Onna-Bugeisha

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]

Onna-bugeisha was a type of female warrior belonging to the Japanese nobility. (wikipedia)

I was initially inspired by a work from Jona Dinges called “Way back home”. I liked the framing, the colours and most especially I was interested by the hair and dress floating in the wind. When I was looking for other references, I found really cool images of people with gigantic robots in the background. So I came up with this idea of a female warrior in a big city that seems under attack.

I took advantage of an offer made by Kitbash 3D during the confinement of march 2020 (they offered for free the Utopia kitbash) and I used a free model of a “ready to animate” big robot. For the warrior, I used a generic model from Mixamo and I modified the hair and dress to match my idea. And last but not least, the sword is also a free model that I found on CG Trader. You must have guessed, this project is mostly a kitbashing work. This allowed me to go pretty fast in the setup my scene and focus on the look.

I was looking for a “japanese anime” style, mixing the frame rate between the character animation (12 fps) and the camera movement (24 fps) to give this “modern” hand drawn animation (the use of the xreTime plugin for Cinema 4D has been very useful to mix 12 and 24 fps in the same scene). To achieve this look, I didn’t use the Toon Shader of Cinema 4D, but a little trick using a simple black and white ramp with hard transition so I could have those very sharp black shadows. Almost every object in the scene is white and the color is given by the physical sky.

May Onna-bugeisha protect our lives.

Scene setup : Cinema 4D
Animation : Cinema 4D
Lighting / Shading / Rendering : Cinema 4D standard engine
Compositing : Nuke