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Project Research

After talking through our inspirations and ideas yesterday, I went away and tried to research some styles and techniques that I could use in my final project and I think I know what sort of direction I want to go in.

I love the low poly style of 3D modelling and animation but I don't want my film to look like a badly animated video game. I know a lot of good low poly work relies of keeping a sense of realism in the animation and not losing the character through a lack of definition. It also occurred to me that lighting in extremely important as that can change the entire mood of a scene but I have no idea where to look for lighting ideas in a low poly stylised animation.

Until I stumbled upon an artist called Jona Dinges. Jona's low poly work is absolutely stunning and maintains a sense of self and personality across his designs. In particular he has some wonderfully lit mini scenes and even a small cloth simulation.



This piece below was modelled in Blender before being imported and set up in the game engine Unity. With good use of colour and lighting, the image has a sense of peace and tranquility as well as giving us a simple but realistic animation. 


After finding his work, I went on to research how cloth could be rendered in a low poly style and found that it's simply a case of removing the smoothing from an object in Maya. After that you get something like this:


As well as using low poly techniques, nCloth can also be used to create realistic organic objects other than cloth such as this leaf.


I started looking for other low poly short films that had a similar feel to what I wanted and came across a short film called EXODUS. The film has a very simple style and a monochrome colour palette but tells a very clear and concise story with the central character being left behind. 

EXODUS from Peder Norrby on Vimeo.

This film in particular has me thinking more about not just the style of my project but the tone, the energy, the rhythm, the colour, the mood and I have so much more I now want to look into.

I'm going to throw in another example or two of what I'm looking at and I'll undoubtedly come back to these later:

The Olympians from Masters of Pie on Vimeo.

Pivot from Pivot on Vimeo.

I definitely still have a lot more work to do but now I feel that I have found a style that may work for what I want to achieve in my final film. I'll continue to look into the low-poly art style and hopefully find more examples that can be incorporated into my project.
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