Tiff Chou

Responsible for all aspects in the reel unless noted otherwise.

Breakdown

Vespa

For the vespa, I tried to model each part of the vehicle as if I were to build it in real life. Thus, parts such as the seat, kickstand and the wheels etc. are all separate geometries. This allowed my thesis group to create the different textures needed faster when we were further down the pipeline, as we wouldn't have to spent time mapping out each UV face for different shaders. As mentioned on the generalist page, each character is individually modeled and rigged so that they could later be imported into different scenes and animated for our thesis film.

Pinocchio street

As my final project, I wanted to do something similar to my internship at Universal Creative where I visualized future attractions for Universal Parks and Resort. I took an original animation background from Pinocchio (belongs to Disney Animation)  and create a 3D model that resembles the environment as closely as possible.

The challenge was to get the model to look as close to the original artwork without any texturing in the little time given. It was interesting and rewarding to figure out how to efficiently create bricks and effectively lay them out as close to the artwork as possible.

Street buildings and Resident houses

One of the biggest challenges in my thesis film was figuring out an efficient way to create a whole city as the film takes place with the protagonist chasing a box around town. I decided that the most efficient way to achieve this was to create five different sets of buildings were each floor was a box that is interchangeable. This created the illusion of many different looking buildings when really, there is only five different buildings. The overall texture of the walls was the element that ties a building with different sets of details such as blinds, windows and awnings together.

Another challenge was to create a residential area. The focus of the residential area was the mom's house, thus to distinguish it, the mom's house is the only one that is different among the other cookie cutter houses. The smaller house suggest a more cozy and intimate feeling when placed among the other bigger houses. However, to distinguish the change from the more commercial side to town to the residential area, harder and colder textures such as bricks and marbles served as the primary textures for the street buildings while softer and more organic textures such as wood served as the primary textures for the residential area. 

Holly

The protagonist of my thesis film is a twenty-something year old girl, thus we wanted to keep some elements of childishness in her face while also making her more defined in the waist and hip area to show her more mature side.

The biggest challenge was creating appealing hair geo. While sculpting hair in zbrush sounded like a good idea at first, it took me several runs of trial and error to figure out that the most efficient way was to go back into maya and create one strand of hair from a base cube. Through softly manipulating the vertices, the one strand of hair geo could be placed onto the head geo easily and once that process started rolling, the hair was done in no time!

Boo (Young Holly)

Creating a younger version of the protagonist was definitely my favorite part of thesis. She is dubbed "Boo" due to the fact that in one of our earlier animatics, she fell from her bike and got a "boo-boo".

To make the two characters resemble each other, I took the head geo of Holly as a starting base and changed the proportions of her facial features so that they're that of a child's. The roundness in the eyes and the shape of the lips were kept the same, but the sharper and more defined nose was replaced with a rounder one that is more button-like and cuter. Although most of the ears are hidden, young Holly's ears are larger and rounder in contrast to the smaller and more oval-shaped ear Holly has. The lace details on the collar were created with a transparency map as opposed to modeling the details in.

Caricature 

They say third time is the charm, and it indeed is. The third time I tried to model a human character in my Junior year, something seemed to have clicked in my head. Granted, I looked at a lot of anatomy reference photos this time around and really tried to create the natural curves and fleshiness that are on a human body.

Like any other character I have modeled, different blendshapes were also created to ensure appealing facial animation could be created. The biggest problem I encountered was the weird manifold geometry faces in the collar area which causes the area to render out black. While that was a pain to figure out, fix and paint weights in, at least it finally renders out somewhat decently in the end. I was also obsessed with the idea of a toothy grin during this time, hence the funny smile on the character.

The office

Another environment that we had to create for our thesis film was the packaging/delivery office. To give off the impression that Holly's job is busy and hectic, her office has to reflect that. Thus, the room is cluttered with boxes ready to be delivered and documents that are ready to be filed.

As a diligent workaholic, she constantly puts her mom off and to emphasize that point her walls are lined with company posters, certificates and other things that show her achievements and dedication to her work in contrast to the walls in her mom's house, which are lined with her childhood photos. Because the office only showed up for a handful of shots in the beginning of the film, it was essential to model everything efficiently so that more time could be spent on setdressing the chase environments which takes up the majority of the film. With that in mind, most objects are extruded from basic shapes with low polycount with the exception of the chair which demands more polycount for it to look soft enough to sit in.

>> check out my other reels for more specific breakdowns of work-flow down below <<