Larva Snake

PERSONAL WORK (showreel project)

[What is the Showreel project ? After spending 4 years as a full time Nuke Compositor and 1 year studying Modeling and Animation, I had no more Motion Design works that were recent and showed my current skills. So I decided to spend a little less than 3 months to create a variety of little projects that would make a full showreel once put together. It has been quite challenging to come up with so many different concepts that I would be able to do from scratch in such a short amount of time, but I’ve learnt a lot during the process]

I wanted to add some “organic-looking-kind-of” animation and I was amazed by this beautiful animation made by Miki Nemcek : https://vimeo.com/223947902. The look of the “larva thing” is just mind blowing and I loved the way the skin change color a thickness when it swells. It reminded me a tutorial I’ve seen from Greyscalegorilla some years ago. You can take a look at the result of this tutorial here : https://vimeo.com/167906928 (the link to the tutorial is in the description).

I tried to get as close as I could with the time I had, and even if I’m not 100% satisfied with the result I think that something interesting can be done, if pushed further. The animation is mostly done by textures that drive deformers. To have a perpetual animation without the use of keyframe, I made a simple Xpresso setup that basically tells the texture to move a bit every frame. That way, as long as the time goes on, the animation will be played. The job that took me the most time is the texturing/shading one. I really loved the pattern that Miki Nemcek created for the video shown above, but I didn’t want to have the same “larva” type… I wanted something closer to a snake even if we can’t really tell if it’s an animal or something else.

The 3 little pieces I’ve made are very short because they were meant to be used in the showreel with a very short cut, but just for the purpose of showing this “clips”, I’ve put them together and mirrored them several times to have a longer video to watch.

Modeling : Cinema 4D
Animation : Cinema 4D (Xpresso)
Lighting / Shading / Rendering : Redshift
Compositing : Nuke
Editing : Da Vinci Resolve