2021
HOJITA
3D shortfilm with watercolor aesthetic.
Combining elements from 2D and watercolor painting, in a 3D environment. Made with Blender and Krita.
What I wanted to explore and investigate with this project was watercolor aesthetic and how to do it in 3D.
I also wanted to incorporate some 2D elements.
​
The story begun with the character of the leaf, I wanted a simple character, that didn't need legs to move and didn't need a face to express emotions, so I could focus on the aesthetic and not on the rigging or animation. To accomplish this I decided that the little Leaf was supposed to only float and the Ant to only appear as a shadow.
For the color pallette I chose earth, greens and cyan tones. As the story unfolds mostly on a grass field, with snipets of the sky.
To achieve this aesthetic my approach was from modeling, shading and lighting. Making use of transparencies in the materials, models without thickness for the leaf and the grass.
​
In the story there's a tree, making it with a plane wasn't working, so in this case I modeled the tree and to break the flawlessness of the 3D I added some cards with a texture of brushes with transparency. For the leaves of the tree I used the same concept as the grass.
​
In the subject of the lighting I wanted soft shadows and to be able to control the animation of shadows with gobos in compositing. This kind of soft lighting also contributed to the aesthetic.
I wanted to work with a render engine in real time, mostly because of the layout of the scenes and the animation. Thanks to this a was able to have control over the placing of the elements and where it needed more or less detail. Besides using the particles system for the grass, I added some of the blades manualy, depending of the shot, to have better a composition.
STORYBOARD
THE ANT
