Hook’d
Hook’d was a short animation project submitted for a Studio Projects class in the 3D Animation & Visual Effects department at the School of Visual Arts. I had the wonderful opportunity to work on it alongside my talented classmates and friends: Jade Yoon, Emily Park, James Karr, and Violeta Maffei.
I was primarily responsible for character and prop rigging, water simulation and shading, scene layout, rendering, compositing, and editing. The creature rigging was mostly done using Advanced Skeleton and Python was used for the props. I was also in charge of the storyboards and initial idea of Hook’d, which was further developed by our team throughout the pre-production process. I modeled the fish monster based off Jade’s concept art, and used Houdini to create a tool that randomly generated simple rock shapes that I tweaked using a lattice deformer to match our scene layout. I also took part in modeling some extra background assets and helped with texturing.
Although the entire process was challenging, we were all excited about the final result. We initially had some doubts about the art direction we were pushing towards, however the final product ended up looking exactly as we imagined it in our concept art and color scripts. Hook’d showcases the awesome work done through the collaboration between a small team of talented artists with different skill sets, which is something I personally value seeing in the final animation. We were able to use our individual strengths to our advantage and create something we are all proud of.