Monkie

Monkie was a fun little project I did during my free time to showcase some of my skills.
Total time was about 1 month, from concept to delivery.
The model & rig is maxformaya, taken from the internet done by Peter Starostin & James Hunt.
Music By, Dave Greendale.

I learned allot during this production, there were to main milestones in this production. Mainly the animation and environment modeling.


Animation

The animation took about 9 days to complete. I used a well know rig called maxformaya. I was very inspired by Glenn keans tarzan animations, and wanted to do something similar.
Before i started on anything i did allot of planning. Studying chimpanzee movement and habits, collected a bunch of video references too. Some of them were really funny to watch actually.
After that, i jumped around like a monkey and recorded my self. Yes, doesn't jude me, because it's REALLY effective. Acting it out and recording reference is the key to good animation, in my opinion! And it's fun too :D




After about 9 days of work, i was finally done with the animation. It was difficult to get my self to sit still and animate. SO i was glad to be done with it. Was definitely the hardest part of the production.

The Jungle.

The jungle is basically one large compositing trick. To model and render a real jungle in 3D would be too expensive, so to simplify the work i had to fake many things in composit.


The actual scene in Maya.
On my previous project (piaget animation), one big mistake i made was not planning the final colours of the render. Which really cost me allot of time at the end.
So this time i decided to do a little colour test, just to plan the colours and look of the render. I'm proud to say it's my first attempt at a colour key :D


My First Attempt at a Color key! Believe it or not this really came in handy later on in production.

Because the majority of the jungle was going to be assembled in composite I had to render many different passes splitting up the scene into different elements with RGB matts. The longest render, was the jungle beauty master, which took about 12 minutes per frame, but thanks to FG baking, and the fact i only rendered for the camera move (64 frames). I could finish rendering that pass overnight.


The master beauty took about 6 min's to render for each frame thanks to FG baking.

Composite

I am falling in love with compositing, honestly. The things you can do through a compositing software is really infinite! I mean really complex effects and looks can be achieved in seconds all to the power of compositing!!We can thank Nuke for that, hallelujah!.

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Majority of the jungle was assembled in composite. A total of 16 different passes and many still renders as well.

Thanks to Nuke's 3D capabilities, i was abel to create the background of the jungle with a bunch of flat renders.

And finally the Finish Composite:

On to the Next one

I've definitely learned allot in this one, to much to write in one article. I think i've improved in some of my skills and also learned more about my weaknesses.

I think the biggest problem with this animation now, is the story. To be honest i kinda rushed the story idea. WHich I am habit ashamed to admit actually, since i advertise my self as a 'idea' driven artist :D.
I realize that the better my work becomes, the more people begin to compare me with the things they see on TV or the net. So the standards are much higher now. ANd good stories is a very important part of doing good work, in fact might be the most important. SO it seems I am expected to perform allot better then before, my 'student' status has expired. I am competing with the industry now. And that's scary and exciting at the same time.