Sherlock & The Missing Piece | 3D Animation Student Short Film

Room Creation

Creation of the room started off by blocking it out in "Maya", populating it with simple spheres and cubes, just to see how it looks in general and to get a feel of it. For a preview and a look that we were going for, we did a quick lighting iteration in "Maya". Later on, everything was transferred to Houdini, where it was rendered. Using our USD pipeline, we could work independently, 3D asset creator could update and populate the room from cubes to real assets, when other departments could work on lighting and animation at the same time. We had a whole pipeline set up for Houdini, so after modeling is done and it went through lookdev, it can be added to our final scene file.

Character Creation

Since no one in our group had enough experience with concept art or were decent at drawing, with the help of AI it was possible to create some ground references that would fit us. It is one of the use cases that AI really saves time and helps to create a lot of variations in no time, since we were on a really strict schedule. Later on, modelling was done in "Blender" closely following the reference and consequently bringing it to "Adobe Substance 3D Painter" for texturing.

Project Breakdown

4 Students worked on this project for 8 weeks. 3 weeks of Pre-Production, 4 weeks of production and one week for post-production. We tracked our progress, must do tasks and progress updates with a help of Miro board. This is the final product of our university course project named "Child room". We had to pick one famous individual and create a child room of his. We picked Sherlock Holmes as our child. All the furniture and layout of the room symbolizes Victorian Era, since he was a child during those times. In this project we closely followed USD pipeline and file sharing on P4V server. Rendered in "Houdini" with "Karma". In post-production "NukeX' was used for compositing.