MINHYUL OLIVIA BAE

Year : 2016

For : School of Visual Arts

Role : Director / 3D Generalist

Responsibility: Modeling, Rigging, Animation, Simulation, Shading, Lighting, and Compositing

Tools : Maya, V-Ray, Nuke, Mari, Zbrush, Photoshop,  Marvelous Designer, Fume FX

Flame is a short animated film that I produced at School of Visual Arts as for my MFA Computer Art Thesis. 

Inspired by the myth of the Divine Bell of the King Seongdeok (in which a king casts a human child into a metal bell in order to produce a beautiful sound), Flame is an animated short centering on a desperate queen on the verge of losing her kingdom. In a hopeful attempt to salvage her realm, she summons a god of destruction, making a supreme sacrifice in the process, resulting in an unintended and tragic consequence.

I wanted to challenge myself on all aspects of techniques for 3D animation so tried several new software in the process. 

For texturing the characters, I used Mari to paint high-resolution textures. Materials were made with a combination of hand-painted textures and procedural maps within Maya and Vray.

For animation, I tried out Perception Neuron Motion Capture suit to capture the actor's movement and applied to the characters through Motion Builder and Maya. Once I apply the initial animation, I did the clean up in Maya to polish. About 70% of animations were made from motion capture data.

For clothing simulation, I used Marvelous Designer to not only make the model, but also the simulating the fabric as well. I exported the Alembic cache file back to Maya and rendered with the character.

For fire simulation, I used both stock 2D fire footages as well as Fume FX plugin for Maya.

I did all of the rigging, simulation, shading, lighting, rendering, compositing and majority of modeling and animation.