Shrimp Fries Rice
Personal Project
A recreation of an Instagram Reel through the 3D pipeline.
This video was:
modeled in Maya,
textured in Substance Suite,
rendered in V-Ray, and
edited in Photoshop.
The Project
I was inspired to create this 3D video after viewing an amusing Instagram reel by Amedeo Capelli on his page, Stoccafisso Design. His account consists of silly and humorous automatons.
Challenges I were expecting were the accurate recreation of the turning mechanism and the organic, yet stiff shrimp rig.
Instagram Reel Credit:
stoccafisso_design
Instagram Page Credit:
stoccafisso_design
3D Modeling
Using screenshots from the reference video, I was able to 3D model, UV unwrap, and set up cameras that matched the reference.
I worked in a low-poly workflow, modeling in a way so that the models could be smoothed when rendering without any problems.
On the right is the wireframe of the scene.
Something that proved difficult was understanding how the turning mechanism operated.
Fortunately, Capelli includes in-depth videos on his automaton creation process, revealing many of the complexities involved.
By analyzing multiple of his videos, I was able to
accurately model and animate the two-part wheel mechanism of the contraption.
Youtube Credit:
North Warrior, DIY wooden automata
- Stoccafisso design
Texturing
Adobe Substance 3D Designer and Painter were used to procedurally create the textures.
I exported diffuse, roughness, and normal maps in 2k.
A highlight from this project was creating wood textures that had continous lines continuing across the model seamlessly. Normally, textures only offer one direction of grain, as seen on the right image. The image below right shows how the lines continue straight down from rings on the sides of the wood plank, allowing for a seamless, realistic texture.
For this project, Position Maps were baked from models to provide UV Space information and a custom Pixel Processor, shown in the image below, was used to apply the textures in the correct orientations.
Single-Direction Wood Texture, Substance Designer
Seamless Ringed Wood Texture, Substance Designer
Pixel Processor Node Graph, Substance Designer
To expeditite the process of exporting textures for each model, I created a Substance Designer Custom Node, which housed the procedural wood texture graph and simplified the user inputs, allowing the position map to be the only input needed to be changed for each new model.
Parameters were added to the custom node to adjust the wood texture to match individual models without having to dig into the custom node and search for specific settings to make changes.
The images below, the left shows the custom node graph in use, and the right shows the contents of the custom node, which includes more custom nodes to simplify the use of the graph.
Below are the models that were textured by the procedural wood graph in Substance Designer.
The non-wood models in the scene had a hand-painted appearance, so I created stylized textures to fit the look.
I utilized Substance Painter and the Slope Blur filter to paint the Shrimp Chef model.
Rigging
Two rigs were created for this 3D animation.
The Chef Shrimp model was rigged in Maya.
Due to the simple action of the arms, a simple IK arm rig was used instead of a full body rig. The strength of the joints were smoothed through weight painting to prevent hard creases.The turning wheel rig was achieved by parenting objects to one another. The gif on the right presents the movement achieved by the parenting.
By parenting the Chef Shrimp’s IK rig handle to the movement of the wheel, the flipping of the pan effect was achieved.
Lighting, Rendering & Post-Editing
Autodesk Maya was used to set up lights to match the reference.
The images were rendered in 4k using V-Ray as my rendering engine.
The images were taken into Adobe Premiere Pro for editing, Adobe After Effects to be color-corrected.