HAT DAY
Hat Day is a one-minute 3D animation created by a team of five junior animators using Maya Autodesk in the spring of 2021. The story is about a pumpkin and a corn shopping for hats in an onion hat store.
Creating Characters & Storyboard
After discussing the story and shots for the animation, one of us sketched out the characters, and we created the storyboard based on the character sketches.
Texturing, Rigging & Binding
One of my teammates and I worked on the texturing, rigging, and binding of the models. In the meanwhile, other team members started modelling other assets we needed in the story world. Painting the body weights of the models took the longest in the process as we want the bodies to look natural when the characters move.
Creating Blendshapes (Facial Expression)
While we were working on rigging, I also created blendshapes for the character models to be used later in the animation stage.
Assembling Assets
Assembling the assets was the most challenging step of the project. Putting everything in the same file caused a lot of unexpected errors that took us a long time to fix. While we were troubleshooting the issues and polishing the story world, we were communicating regularly on Discord, updating the storyboard, and working on the lighting. The storyboard was updated several times during the iterative design process and was reduced from the initial 22 shots to the final 11 shots.
Animating & Rendering
After having the story world well-polished, we divided the shots and animated them. One difficulty we encountered was that some team members’ computers didn’t have the right configuration to render the shots in time. They had to upload the Maya files onto our shared google drive folder and have other members help render some of the shots.
Sound Design & Editing
While we were rendering the shots, I researched and collected the sound files we needed for the final editing. Everything was assembled in Adobe Premiere Pro after receiving all the rendered frames from my teammates.