Pizza Dou
In my third trimester, I was lucky enough to group up with two others who were competent at 3D and one really good 2D artist. I knew we had a good team, and so I took this project very seriously. From the start, I laid out some rules and advice for how we should approach the project. The first rule was to avoid action or any other really flashy and complex animation. A lot of the time students get caught up on how cool an effect or action sequence could be that they forget about building a strong base first. I, however, knew for such an early trimester we should rely on a good story and find areas to show off within that. I also advocated for complex environments instead of complex animation, as thats what we were already good at. Once we found a good idea, we hit the ground running.
Shots I was in charge of
Me and my group immediately knew we wanted the whole environment to be done in Lego. However, we also knew how hard that would be, so I set out to build a geometry node system that would convert mesh to Lego. However, I wasn’t able to use the methods taught on YouTube, as they relied on a mesh-to-volume node to scatter the points on a grid within the mesh. At the time, my PC was not very good, so I ended up creating a grid with math and deleting points outside the mesh with the raycast node. This ran a lot smoother and allowed us to do the Lego water as well.
SAE Award
Whilst I did feel our project came out very nicely, when entering it in the SAE Awards, we did not expect to win anything, let alone first place. We ended up being the very first from Sydney Campus to ever win. Not only that, but most winners submitted a project from their major work where your group is given their final two trimesters to do everything they can. We, however, won with just one trimester in our first year of study. Needless to say, I was pretty proud of me and my team.
Award Ceremony
Linkedin Post
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