DEVIANT

Music Video Snippet



Role

3D Generalist

Collaberators

Out of Flux

Duration

1 Month

Nov-Dez 2024

Tools

Houdini

Nuke

Davinci Resolve

§ Project Description

This was an assignment for Andreas Cattucci, a lecturer at the FH Salzburg working at Panoply in London. He assigned us a task to find something we are interested in—an art piece, a style, or even a tool we wanted to develop, all in the spirit of curiosity—and create a project from it.

As I enjoy creating short animations best underlined by music, I immediately knew I was going to make a little music piece. However, I am always curious about optimizing workflows and achieving results as quickly as possible. So, I wanted to reduce the tedious process of importing characters from Mixamo, assigning textures, and so on.

Thus, I created the Mixamo Importer, which essentially imports an already downloaded model from Mixamo that has been run through a PDG process to rebake the textures, rename individual body parts, and more, ensuring they are all uniform. The Importer currently supports about 10 characters from Mixamo. The exciting part is that you can easily apply any Mixamo animation you find onto them, as they all share the same skeleton. This makes adding animated characters into your 3D scene a way easier task.


§ Process

The idea for the film came to me quite early. I was driving on the freeway when I came across multiple signs on the side of the road. I thought, "What if I drove so fast that the signs would almost feel like an animated movie?" Following this thought, I quickly sketched a short animated sequence to get a sense of the narrative and overall feel. This became the first previs for the movie.

§ Learnings

- Rebaking Textures in Houdini
- Fetching and Modifying Geometry Data using Python/VEX/TOPs
- 3D Animation & basic Rigging
- Using Layout Features of Solaris


§ Music / Credits

I went on Artlist for the music because it’s pretty easy to find tracks that fit the videos I want to create. I came across the track "The Lighthouse" and instantly had visuals in my head for what I wanted to create. So, credit goes to Out of Flux for this masterpiece.




© Jona Melvin Grobe