Writer's Block

A short animation created by a team of six: myself and five other students of the Texas A&M Visualization program. As a team, we brainstormed the initial concept, produced story development materials, and took that story to completion. Writer’s Block was created over the course of about three months— mainly using Pixar’s Renderman, Autodesk Maya, and Adobe’s Substance Suite.

Thanks to my team:

Hailey Alvarez

Zach Hillard

Paige Miller

Coby Wilson

Greta Yeager

My Contributions

For this short, I did all of the 3D layout passes. I modeled the entire exterior environment aside from the house itself, as well as the bookshelf and books of the interior environment. I rigged the character and did significant animation (shots 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 13). On top of that, I surfaced several props and the majority of the desert.

Procedural Assets

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I made two primary procedural assets for Writer’s Block:

 

    The background rock formations
    The desert floor texture

 

The background rock formations were created in Houdini. I spent around two weeks working on them, and ended up going through three complete restarts before I was somewhat happy with how the models were coming out. They’re controlled by a few variables, mainly width, depth, and how many internal structures are used during the generation. Those values, as well as a given seed value were all the inputs necessary for the presented outputs. I took those outputs separately into Substance Painter for the surfacing.

The desert floor texture was created in Substance Designer and tiled in Maya using Hypershade nodes.

Layout Passes

Writer’s Block was my largest layout project to date.

 

My main goal during the project was maintaining good comedic timing. Because comedy is difficult to nail down, I iterated on the shot timing for this layout extensively. Working exclusively on it for three weeks before continuing to adjust it for another two alongside other tasks. In general, that presented itself as a tendency towards longer build up and snappier motion.

 

The other main challenge I ran into throughout was getting the camera angles to read right. I ended up toning down the steepness of the Old Man’s POV shots considerably, and had to modify the framing of the house and window repeatedly to make sure that location was maintained between shots.

The 2D animatic was drawn by Paige Miller and edited together by Zack Hillard