‘The World Of…’ KNGF

During the two years I worked at Colorbleed I had the opportunity to work on the wonderful ‘The World Of…’ commercials for KNGF.

In these films, we guide you into the internal world of the main characters and show the real difference an assistant dog can make.

I have filled all kinds of roles. Mainly doing Look Development, Lighting, Shading, Rendering, Compositing, and more. On this page, I will showcase some of the work I have done and the way I like to go about creating stylized animation.

Lookdev

Based on the illustrations of Audrey, I created textures in Substance Painter for the characters. One texture that only appears when light hits the character and one with different shapes that is only visible in shadow.

In Maya, we would combine these textures with Vray toon shading and additional shader magic like stylized rim lighting, painterly gradations, and toon lines.

When lighting you can really see the graphical shapes changing in a painterly way.

Lighting

What I like to do is light out key moments of the shot first, kind of like a style frame, and next make those moments nicely flow into each other. When lighting stylized shaders it can be difficult to see what you are doing. However, rendering an extra ‘clay’ layer made it really visible and also gave me a mask to continue the ‘lighting’ in comp. In this case, I used that mask to add the yellow haze to her face for example.

Compositing

With a stylized art style, a lot of ‘lighting’ usually also needs to happen in comp. Here you can see a few layers I used to build this scene. In addition to those, we also used render layers with RGB lighting, bounce layers, and many more interesting passes to really be able to give an expressive final touch in Comp.

VISDEV SMOKE

The smoke we used is typically seen in sports matches and was a big part of communicating the trauma Roland suffered.

To make the transition believable, the smoke needed a rough and graphical feel to reflect his experience clearly. Pulling off stylized moving smoke in 3D was difficult. I made many iterations and really liked the artistic and technical challenges.

Final

The smoke was as much a technical challenge as an artistic one. Together with our technical- director and artist, we did our best to pull off the rough style in a clean way. It resulted in a way of utilizing the raw expressiveness of 2D design to really capture this fearful world in the grounded space of stylized 3D.