I started modeling and texturing scenes in my animation. Totally I need four scenes: working room, livingroom, corridor and printing room.
Since these rooms requires a lot of furnitures and props. I modeled part of it, others are found on the internet, all the models are free. After that I textured them in Substance Painter. I did two versions of the livingroom. One is for the first part of the story, and the second version is for the suicide scene. I firstly layout the scene and build the pose of dead body, after that I export the character and the scene into Substance Painter to draw the blood. It took me several days to finish shading and texturing.
I started to design my character after finished the script. The character is a man who works as an architect/designer in a company. The character should wear like an office stuff. Therefore, I draw an outfit design for the character. The design is quite normal. The man is wearing blue shirt, jeans and sneakers.
Below is the design of the character:
After that I modeled the character. I firstly find a free male base character on website and reshape his head in Zbrush to get the result that I want. I then find our clothes in character creator 4, which is quite suitable for my character.
I then used Substance Painter and Mari to paint skin textures of this character. I spent most of the time making diffuse texture, normal and SSS textures because these textures will significantly affect the quality of character rendering. Especially the SSS ( sub-surface scattering) texture, which judges the texture of human bone and skin.
After that I also used the base model to generate the human-like creature for this animation. The creature has a giant and weird mouth which is full of blood. It also has long fingers, which looks creepy. I also want the creature looks like a dead body and has some blood on it’s skin. Therefore, I used Substance Painter to make another version of skin texture. This skin texture has more green and blue colors on it to mimic the dead body texture. I used some physical brush to paint blood on the model so that it can form quite realistic blood flow effects on the body. These brushs are really handy, which can also be used in the texturing of environment.
This week I started to prepare for my FMP. What I would like to do in my FMP is a short horror animation which is based on some urban legend artworks such as SCP, Backrooms, Mandela Catalogue, Game Control , etc.
I firstly did some research on urban legend stories and artworks, trying to find out which kind of style I want. Urban legends usually base on some background like night city, village, secret laboratories and folk stories. I finally decided to build up a story based on abnormal space and abnormal products.
After that I came with several ideas like secret investigations, laboratory accidents and other things. I finally choose to write a weird experience of a normal person working at midnight. I want the protagonist to get into a space that looks normal at first, but as the story goes the space will become weird and become aggressive.
Here is the breif of this story:
CHANNEL-7: the protagonist who works overtime until midnight experiences hallucinations after watching a non-existent Channel-7 program on TV, which triggers his abnormal behavior and leads to tragedy.
I decided to split this story into three parts:
Part 1, the protagonist is working normally and accidentally get into the strange space (in his mind).
Part 2, the protagonist exploring in this space and then find out weird things in this space. Finally the protagonist was trapped in this space and lost.
Part 3, back to the reality, the protagonist has been found dead and committed susuicide.
Storyboard
Based on the story, I started to draw the storyboard, which is about 40-50 shots. I added more shots during the production, and finally the storyboard covers about 50-60 shots.
