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