Rock Pools

Introduction

Our story follows a young girl named Lisa who is rock pooling at the beach, but finds herself in danger when she doesn't listen to her father.

Rock Pools was created as an assignment at Bournemouth University. Originally created in a concept class, it then progressed to the 'group project' - a class where we are randomly assigned a group to make a 30 second animation over 12 weeks.

We decided to work in Unreal Engine 5 for the majority of the project as we had a small production timeline and real-time rendering proved itself to be the right choice for our group in the end. 

For those who don't know what rock pooling is, it is an activity popular with children at the beach. When the tides rolls out, it can leave small pools of sea water trapped in a collection of rocks, and inside you can search for a variety of sea creatures that are stuck until the tide returns.

Concept

Carrie Anderson

As mentioned above, the concept and story was created for a concepting class a semester before the group project. The task was to create a character and story for a 30 second animation.  

Carrie created a story based off of her own experiences in the north of Scotland, and took inspiration from her family  members for the character design. This went through multiple iterations to find a unique style for the character. Other inspiration for the style came from Scottish children's book artist and popular stop motion movies like Coraline (2009).

Colour Script and Animatic

The colour script was the first basis of a storyboard. Carrie then revisited this numerous times to create our final animatic of which we would base the animation on.

Modelling

Batuhan Binkaya and Xinyu Guan

Assets

Our assets were modelled by Batuhan, who used the references from the concept art to accurately model the props, crab, and Dad.

Lisa

Lisa was modelled by Xinyu, who began blocking out the character in Maya, the modelled the rest in ZBrush. She used a combination of the turnaround from concept and references from stop motion media and clay characters so that the character would be accurate not just to the design but also to the style of the film. 

She revisited the sculpt multiple times to refine and alter the design based on feedback. Initially, she went through the process of creating a face and mouth bag as we were still testing a 2D face rig and made sure we had a back up plan in case the 2D rig failed. Ultimately, we chose to go with the 2D rig and so in the final version her facial features were removed.

Texturing

Xinyu Guan

Xinyu created all of the textures for our film. With a references sheet of fabrics given by Carrie, she experimented in Substance Painter to create Lisa's lovely soft and appealing final look. To make sure the assets were in keeping with the design, she used similar soft fabric designs on the sea creatures to make them look like they are knitted. 

To make our process streamlined, Xinyu also created a smart material for our rocks. This meant that when we went into Unreal Engine, we could easily assign the material to all the rocks. 

Rigging

Lorenzo Bressani

Lorenzo was responsible for all of the rigging in our group. Early on, we had been considering the issue of the very expressive emotions Lisa has, and Lorenzo suggested using a 2D rigged face to imitate paper cut outs that would replicate the methods used in stop motion of switching out the expressions. 

He modelled a variety of mouths and eyes to match the emotions seen in the animatic in a flat 3D mesh, and rigged all of them. We were also able to easily switch between them so that we can transition between them on the rig. A secondary problem with this method was that it did not sit on the face as we needed it. Lisa emotes in a way that her mouth and eyes slide across her face, to achieve this effect, Lorenzo used a lattice deformer so that the face rig can wrap itself to the curvature of the head. For the body he used advanced skeleton, but added some custom controls so that we could animate her hair and add some wiggle to her sleeves without having to simulate the entire jacket.

The crab was manually rigged to give us the correct controls, and the dad used advanced skeleton. There was no need for facial controls for the dad as he is only ever seen in the background or from below the waist.

Animation 

Carrie Anderson and Lorenzo Bressani

Carrie and Lorenzo split the animation between themselves and animated in Maya. A choice was made to animate on two's to keep with the theme of imitating a stop motion aesthetic. We wanted to make sure Lisa was enjoyable to watch and emotive, so for every emotion, we used her hair to push the feelings, acting as if they were bunny ears.

Lorenzo also initially animated the crab as a test of the rig, but this was then repurposed later on as Easter eggs in the background of some of the earlier shots in the film.

Environments

Syed Safa Aaliah

Our environments were built in Unreal Engine 5. To begin, Safa blocked out an early concept using Quixel Bridge assets. She then went through multiple iterations over the next few weeks trying to copy the concept art. She modelled rocks in Maya and began to create our starting scene.

One of the biggest challenges Safa faced was matching the stylisation, particularly with the clouds. We tried a couple of methods, initially planning to use 2D drawn clouds and compositing them in, but instead Safa found a way to manipulate the volumetric clouds inside of UE to give them a stylised look. She also worked hard to make sure the water and beach matched the stylisation and leant away from  dipping into realism.

Lighting

Syed Safa Aaliah

Lighting in Unreal was fairly simple. Safa had to match the direction of the sun, in the directional light, in each shot for consistency, we had a few bounce lights to reflect the blue water onto the rocks and Lisa. 

One of the shots was a bit challenging as the weather changes to a darker sky giving the feeling of being stranded and alone. Safa did this using blueprint in Unreal Engine, she had two pre-sets controlling the exposure, cloud density, and the Rayleigh scattering in the sky atmosphere. To make the transition in real-time as the camera shifts from Lisa to her dad she had to set target parameters that changed depending on the interpolation speed we set. This gave us a smooth transition that affected our entire scene seamlessly.

Post-processing was entirely done in Unreal itself. Using the post-process volume box, we could control many aspects including colour grading the overall scene, shadows, and mid tones. We could add a stylistic look to our film by diffusing the lighting and shadows. Post process especially helped us integrate the water better into our scene since we had such a stylistic character and props. Colour-grading the mid-tones and reducing the contrast and gamma helped give it an almost painterly look which worked well with the low poly rocks in the shots.

Final Touches

Carrie Anderson and Syed Safa Aaliah

Carrie and Safa worked in UE5 to set up cameras and export the shots. Safa took one of the shots into Nuke to have a focal shift from Lisa to the crab. 

Carrie had also made some 2D elements including some buble animations and a 'The End' drawing in the sand. She took the rendered shots and edited them with sound in Premiere Pro then added in the 2D elements as overlays - and the film was done!

Our Team

Carrie Anderson - Director, Producer, Concept artist, Animator

Syed Safa Aaliah - Environment artist, Lighting artist, Compositor

Batuhan Binkaya - Modeller

Lorenzo Bressani - Rigger, Animator

Xinyu Guan - Modeller, Texturer