SQ - How many hours a day do you commit to your animations? It varies really but usually about 14 hours and bits and bobs over the weekend. When your creating your own work
time seems to disappear, and, as its animation it takes a long time to complete.
SQ - Your second animation is called "Cursed Rik." It seems that Rik has a bit of bad luck.
How did the idea for it come about and what approaches to planning did you use? I had a rough idea for this whilst working on the little thief and wanted to make something with a more upbeat look and feel. I drew up a list of influences and watched a lot of the physical comedy actors like Jacques Tati and Harold Lloyd. I always watch a lot of films in the same genre before I start writing, which really helps and also gives me an excuse to watch lots of
films. Then from that I created a fairly simple storyline and storyboarded that. I then created an animatic which I could then drop in preview renders and finally final renders. I had to change a few shots around and ad new ones to help the flow.
SQ - The city scenes in "Cursed Rik" are fabulous how were they achieved? Thank you. I'm glad they worked. I wanted to show a whole city so went about making various buildings, textured differently on each side so I could keep the models to a minimum. I also had several flat plates setup to give the illusion of the city continuing into the horizon. I researched a lot of art deco architecture as I'm a fan of all those old buildings and I wanted that kind of look, then adapted them into different shapes and colors and added details like signage and lampposts. Lighting and rendering such a large scene was pretty difficult and I went through a lot of trial and error. I originally wanted a radiosity solution, but this was in lightwave 8 so radiosity was out of the question. So I decided on the SG_AmbOcc shader to give it that radiosity
look but the shear amount of surfaces and models was too much so I ended up just
using it on the floor so the buildings had a nice shadow where they meet with the floor model.
To view Cursed Rik Trailer, click here
