Mantyke Swings By - Taylor

This was my final project for the foundations term at Think Tank Training Centre. During this time I was in a bit of a Pokémon phase and so for my concept I went with one of my favorite cards. During this 5+ week period I did my best to recreate the original artists work in 3d while maintaining the spirit of the work.

I had, and still, planned for this to become a 16:9 short animation of the Pokémon swimming by but unfortunately during the last few days I had issues with my software licenses and will be exploring that idea further in my own time. This also prevented me from including any more passes or specific renders of different aspects sadly.

During this project I really struggled with deciding the level of stylization to strive for in this piece. While trying to remain faithful to the reference image, I slightly modified elements to make them more realistic or work in a 3d medium.

One of the hardest parts of the project for me was the caustics and environment fog that is present in the ocean portion but also the indoor portion. I focused on this intensely during my first weeks of the project. The look development of the fog and overall environment was the biggest challenge in the project in my mind.

As mentioned above I had planned to expand this image into a 16:9 short animation, but sadly was not able to finish that portion due to unforeseen difficulties. This portion was partially going to include references and thank yous to those who helped me during this process and encouraged me to keep working. What I have included below is an early version of this larger version and you can see items expanded around the frame, most of which have some person meaning to me or those close to me.

I created a progress video with a selection of my WIP renders to show a more in-depth process of the creation.