Forsaken

A short animation created by a team of six: myself and five other students of the Texas A&M Visualization program with feedback and assistance from several Dreamworks mentors. Forsaken was created over the course of about ten weeks— mainly using Pixar’s Renderman, Autodesk Maya, and Adobe’s Substance Suite.

Thanks to my team:

Andrea Ballesteros

Daniel Arellano

Dominic Nguyen

Emma Krilowicz

Skylar Thomas

My Contributions

For this short, I was responsible for all of the rigging. I also led layout passes, render optimization, and wrote automation scripts for both pipeline management and scene repair.

The Rig

This rig was made using a custom Python library. I implemented a reversible spine that allows motion to be driven by either the upper body or the lower body, in addition to space switching for arms, legs, and eye controls.

Scripts and Documentation

For this project, I got the opportunity to write scripts for facilitating increased efficiency across the pipeline, in addition to documentation on how our project was structured and how to properly accomplish different tasks. These scripts were primarily written in Python, with select portions written in MEL and Bash Script.

  • On the pipeline side, I wrote scripts for releasing assets, renaming assets, and updating a group bulletin board.
  • In Maya, I wrote scripts for fixing colorspace assignments in the Renderman Texture Manager, Correcting filepath assignments (which fixed a long-standing render bug on our pipeline), and a whole host of smaller functions for cleaning up specific elements of the scene.