Major project/ Pre-production

The story is taking place in contemporary Greece, in December 2012, and the location of the clip is the Ancient Greek Temple of Poseidon, in Cape Sounion.

The protagonist of the clip is the Ancient Greek God Poseidon who will confront one of his archenemies, a Dark Archangel.

The background story is that the time has come for the return of the Gods of the Ancient Greek Pantheon. The storyline is based on the premise that the One God that took over the world from the Old Gods was not the benevolent Supreme Being, but the so-called Demiurge (meaning ‘Creator’ in Greek) who was flawed and corrupt, leading the world into a spiral of darkness. After centuries of degeneracy and decadence, people have begun to return to the Old Gods in increasing numbers. As a result, the Old Gods are now gaining back their powers and are returning in order to fight the Dark Demiurge in an epic battle for the world.

A story that a good friend of mine, John Haygood, and I developed some time ago.

These are some early character concepts featuring the ancient gods living among us with contemporary clothing.

Major project

Our next and final project from this year is the major one. In this project we're free to choose on our own what we want to produce. It can either be personal work or a collaboration with other people. So, for this project I decided to direct my own short CG cinematic trailer. I will try to achieve hyper realism, push further modelling and texturing and also to learn new techniques and experiment with simulations, mechanics, lighting and rendering. My friends will also help me bring this project to life and we will be a team of six people.

This time my idea for the project would be based on Greek mythology...
Cause I'm really a fan of fantasy genre.

Red Bull advert showreel

Modelling, texturing, lighting, rendering, compositing. Enjoy :)

Final Red Bull advert

The project is finally finished!! And we were really happy about it! Our 7-week hard work finally came to life and here it is.. ENJOY!

Red Bull project backgrounds and paintings

Sky and clouds background painting that I did in the post-production.

Scene 11 of the advert, background painting.

T-shirt design for our main character.

Red Bull advert/ Lighting-Rendering

Although it was a 3d project, we wanted the outcome to have 2d visual style. So, when it came to the Lighting and Rendering stage, I had lots of experiments. As far as the lighting is concerned, I used the standard area lights within Maya 2015. But I also had to decide which rendering engine I would use. The problem was that I wanted to avoid to look too CG. 

I firstly tried to use the Mental Ray renderer, but after a few tests, I decided with a different one, which was also a Maya's standard one, Maya Hardware 2.0. The reason for that was that I was able to get a flat 2d representation of my viewport. After setting the render settings to full HD and the anti-aliasing to smooth and multisample with a sample count of 16, I was able to get what I originally wanted. But it wasn't quite there yet, I had also to tweak the lighting to match the rest of the visuals. So, I tried to use the Toon Shader and I finally got it!

Red Bull advert/ Production

The texturing was quite a challenging part of the production, because I had to paint them to match the 2d visuals. I wanted to have a similar style to the Mac 'n' Cheese animation, Colorbleed, so I experimented on different painting techniques and especially with the brush strokes. I was pretty happy with the end result and matched to our initial idea for the project.

Red Bull advert/ Production

Modelling the characters and the assets was a pretty straight-forward process. I kept the polys to a reasonable for the animation count and because we were going for a 2d cartoonish style and not trying to achieve realism, I didn't have to reach extremely high number of polygones.

Red Bull advert/ Pre-production

ZBrush WORK IN PROGRESS

Moving on, and while we're still at the Pre-production of the project, I started some ZBrush sketches to check the proportions of the characters and also research further the concept ideas.

Red Bull advert/ Pre-production

My initial sketches and concepts for the characters of the advert. Our idea for it was to have a window cleaner character that would fall from the top of huge building desperately trying to catch a Red Bull can during his fall, while his "enemy", a seagull, would take the can away from him. And as a result the guy would land to a skip down in the street.

Sketching different head types, we wanted to be a tired from his work character, mid-age, but funny at the same time.

Searching different body types

Red Bull project/ Pre-Production

Research Art Styles
As I was the artist in the team my role was to produce the concept art, stylistic aproach and build and texture the 3d elements of the advert. So, I started by researching previous art styles, animations and 3d works that inspired me and we decided to go more with the Mac 'n' Cheese visual style.