This was a fun project that I developed with Storyfarm for PSEG. It's a hybrid of 2D/3D elements, which was challenging blending together. It had a Pixar-eqsue backbone in terms of the storytelling and an emotional connection with the audience.
It has a mix of 3D elements from Cinema 4D and 2D elements coming from Illustrator/After Effects. I am not the most talented illustrator, so Cinema 4D allowed me to create the 3D environments and rotate them at different angles. I can just model hard surface elements much faster than drawing to fill out the scene. Also added some table top kitchen elements from the content browser.
The characters I drew in Illustrator and imported into After Effects for rigging. The facial rigging was with Joysticks and Sliders and a there's some Rubberhose mixed in there. The cel style shading was mostly by hand, it was pretty challenging to draw so many layers, I'd typical done shading via gradients or left layers flat on my illustration work between Illustrator and After Effects.
Also fun was blending in the 3D effects for the fluids in the washer, I did that with X-Particles. With the right shading it fit into the scenery, and the fluid sim options for the water and soapy suds was much more robust than trying to accomplish that in After Effects.
While I was at it I created the splatter and meatball dynamics in 3D as well. Just felt like I would get a better physics based result there. Plus you could always line up and trace it in After Effects if you want, but I liked the result out of Cinema 4D.
Also had an opportunity to use an AI tool for the first time in a real project, I used Kaedim 3D to create 3D model of the bear to help with my positioning and angles on a couple shots where he was angled. The tool actually worked incredibly well and might use it in the future for certain modeling projects, it really did figure out from an very basic illustration how to get that into 3D and saved me a ton of time I didn't really have.
