Drifandi
- Animation short film -
As usual, Drifandi the Icelandic horse is grazing calmly on his pasture. Although he doesn’t seem to bother, the grass looks trod down and has lost a lot of its original freshness.
When out of nothing an oak leaf falls right onto Drifandis rear and an epic journey starts to unfold.
Final camera sequence
Storyboard
Concept Document
Although being very summarized, the concept document defines all important bits and pieces. It sets the plot, the look-and-feel, and covers aspects of the technical execution. As a complement to the storyboard it is guidance and inspiration at the same time.
3D Modeling and Rigging
For Drifandi I built a fully functional animation rig. Its bone-structure was based on a real Icelandic horse and was extended with helper elements deform the neck properly. On top of this, a simplified muscle system enabled even more realistic deformations. Additionally, the skin is able to slide over the muscle-volume, which avoids squeezing of the skin polygons. This could otherwise have lead to problems while rendering the fur. As a nice surplus, the neck and tail hair of Drifandi is controllable and yet physically simulated.
Rendering
To be honest, rendering Drifandi’s fur was tough. It took a lot of trials and benchmarking to find a performant rendering method, that delivered optimal results.
In the end, it was convenient to reduce rendering quality and apply a lot of magic during compositing. This saved weeks of rendering time. Have a look at the compositing layers below.
Turntable of Drifandi
Compositing
1/28 Background gradient- 2/28 Clouds
- 3/28 Rough soil
- 4/28 Background 2D plates tracking
- 5/28 Background 2D plate I
- 6/28 Background 2D plate II
- 7/28 Background 2D plate III
- 8/28 Grass
- 9/28 Dirt-patch
- 10/28 Dirt-patch - Ambient occlusion
- 11/28 Fence
- 12/28 Fence highlight
- 13/28 Shadows on fence
- 14/28 Bush
- 15/28 Dirt-patch close-up
- 16/28 Dirt-patch close-up - Ambient occlusion
- 17/28 Shadows on dirt-patch
- 18/28 Bucket
- 19/28 Bucket - Ambient occlusion
- 20/28 Fur background
- 21/28 Drifandi
- 22/28 Drifandi - Ambient occlusion
- 23/28 Fur foreground
- 24/28 Drifandi - Color correction
- 25/28 Close-up grass
- 26/28 Close-up grass - Ambient occlusion
- 27/28 Applying field of depth
- 28/28 Final color correction