Guardian's Lament Film

Technical Director, Rigging Lead, & 3D FX Artist

Get in touch tessa.carter2001@gmail.com

Overview of Responsibilities

Guardian's Lament is an 8 minute, 3D animated film about a robot and a creature working together to save the forest they both love. As the technical director on this film, I was responsible for the following:

Creating the rig for our creature from scratch
Teaching and aiding in the creation of our robot's rig, and being the final person to test it before handing it off to production
Establish the pipeline leading from rigging and animating Maya, transferring those animations to Blender, then rendering them
Worked with our pipeline technical artist, Mikyle Mosquera, to optimize this pipeline with tool creation
Problem solved and created our optimized set and grass scattering system
Created a directory for materials to be dragged and dropped onto our characters
Set up all file structure and hierarchies for each shot
Developed and implemented all 3D FX

Proof of Concept and Planning

As the story grew in progress, I knew that the technical limitations and aspects of the film had to be figured out ASAP. On my own, I did many tests so that our story could be guided by what was possible and feasible in our time limit, while also making a beautiful looking film. Most tests involved combining multiple aspects of potential story points into a render to see if the look matched our vision, as seen here.

These tests were done solely on my own to test our pipeline, through set dressing, lighting for different times of day, and even testing water and flock simulations that, while unused, proved a fun challenge to learn and implement in our tests. Each scene features grass, wind, flock, and water 'simulations' made by Blender's procedural geometry nodes.

Making Grass

The grass in our film had to be optimized for our rendering times, being a scattering system that can occupy our set, while also being flexible enough for our team's visions of each shot. This led to a paintable, and very customizable system of individually drawn grass blades that were scattered over any surface.

Some of it's features included:

Height and scattering gradients
Colors customized to lighting
Object collision with editability
Camera culling with editability
Wind simulation with movement and color changes
Easy drag and drop setup

3D FX Development and Implementation

There were originally 3 different 3D FX node-based simulations used for this film: Lightning Magic, Flow-y Magic, and Corruption.

The Lightning FX was the most straightforward, using two separate simulations: One for the main beam, which could be drawn and edited in the scene, and one located both on the creature's head and where the lightning would hit in scene, creating an 'impact' of lightning. This FX was also added onto with 2D FX to make it truly shine. This also included a vine growing simulation for when the lightning impacted a mesh, with the speed and growth controllable.
The Flow-y FX, used when the creature control her magic, was done via a drawn, transparent image, and added onto with shaders, before being controlled with curves for a twisty, fluid animation.
The Corruption, not used in the final film, was accomplished via simulation nodes so that it would seek out meshes, climbing over and around them and consuming them. It also interacted with the grass, having it wilt, which was a part that was used in the final film during the climax. The reverse of this was also used in our resolution, having everything grow back.

Version of the original corruption simulation

Decay as in the film

"Reversed" decay with Flow-y magic

Creature Rig

This rig was first created on an anatomical skeleton I modeled in order to put the joints in the best places, considering her unique anatomy and muscle structure. This also aided in our pipeline, allowing the rig to be started while the model was still in process, as long as it followed the basic anatomy.

This fully custom rig features:

FK to auto-overlap switch for ears, whiskers, and tail leaves with adjustable strength, using an altered, custom script of Maya's Bonus Tools
Adjustable and toggle-able squash and stretch for legs, body, tail, and neck
Knee, Elbow, Ankle, and Wrist pinning
Ik/Fk switches for tail, legs, and front claws
Full facial rig and facial picker done using a both blendshapes and joints for animation ease and sticking to character expression sheet
Created Maya scripts to aid in implementation of auto-overlap creation, fk-control creation, self-group creation, etc.

Animations by Daniel Nimori, Jimmy Nguyen, and Nhan Nguyen

Autodesk Maya

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