Arache Bar Animation
Against all odds, I managed to make something coherent. This is Arache, a character I created about a year ago, and I absolutely love his design, so I wanted to see how well I could pull it off in 3D. After rigging it, I knocked out this quick face test.
It’s.. A little rough around the edges, but considering it’s my first time working in 3D with this much complexity, I feel it’s still shockingly good. After this, I wanted to make a much more fleshed out, chill scene. My inspiration was an anime by the name of Nichijou, a comedy about some high school girls getting up to shenanigans. Specifically, the anime has these insert shots between the skits
In the show, they’re just out-of-context shots of a location, and it flips back to it every so often with some minor changes, like a character walking through. The feeling these shots give though is kind of impeccable. It triggers a sorta lonely nostalgia for a place I have no recollection of. They feel strangely comforting. I’ve been more than a little bit obsessed with these shots since I first saw Nichijou.
I wanted to make one of these shots myself. Welcome to Soulmarket has a couple locations that are baked into the characters that occupy them. I wanted to try to model one of these locations, and animate different characters with differing relationships with this place, and see if I could use some quiet storytelling about who does and doesn’t belong here. Arache was first.
Exterior of the bar.
There’s quite a lot of detail here that didn’t make it into the animation itself. The shelves are all stocked, the ‘lounge’ area is overtaken by a massive tree that’s been decorated with hanging lights that also go around the room itself.
Bar Area
All that was left was to find some good camera angles, place Arache in the scene and mess with the lighting til’ it felt right. The first shot is right outside the bar window, close up to the mushrooms, and peering in.
Next was a close up to some mushrooms growing on the side of the tree, and finally a pan from the lounge to Arache, wrapping up with some more intimate, closer shots on his face.
Postproduction was fairly straightforward. Just rendered out all the frames and threw them into Premiere. Minor color correction and sound were added. (The song is You Were Here by Kensuke Ushio in the Chainsaw man anime, plus some royalty free atmosphere noise from ZapSplat)
This project as a whole was a hell of a learning experience, and I’m super proud of the result. It did however show me my own limitations. (Especially in the time it took to make!) More than anything it makes me excited to work in 3D and see just how much further I can push.
Oh boy this project. So, back in March, I decided I wanted to learn sculpting. Stupidly, I decided that right after learning the program, I should go straight to a complex humanoid character. From scratch.