My bachelor project at Hochschule Darmstadt, Working Heart tells the story of a woman, who is working as the technical support at Cupids company, caring about broken hearts and repairing them, just to realise that she is neglecting her own love life because of her work.
I was responsible for Look Development, Rigging, Shading, Lighting, Rendering, Compositing. Scroll down to find out how it was made
As this movie is not released yet, all I can show you are some screenshots. Stay tuned!
The face rig, which also was of most importance (since the character needed to express a whole set of emotions), was built up to be as flexible as possible for the animator.This project was entirely rendered in deep, which helped a lot to ease up and simplify the workflow. if you’re interested, check out my paper regardingDeep Compositing DeepEXR promises a much more flexible workflow, but also needs way more storage than a traditional EXR. The short is roughly three minutes long, but it required over 5 TB to store the rendered data. This, however, does not slow down the workflow when using Solid State Drives. In Nuke, Compositing could be done in 3D rather than 2D. Fake volumetrics, particle systems and masks could be implemented in the 3D Workspace of Nuke, which resulted in a very fluid and object based Compositing workflow. Not only was one able to add objects, the separately rendered layers could simply be merged in 3D, wtithout the need for Hold-out masks or matte objectsUsing Bokeh by Peregrinelabs, the Deph of Field was calculated off the 3D pixels rather then Z Depth. Also, the plugin can emulate a real camera. That further enhanced the look of the short.
