Fishcake (2020)
Fishcake
The Bachelor Project 'Fishcake'; was produced alongside a thesis to re-create the illustrative visual style of the concept film in a real-time 3D animation environment in Unity.
The goal was to create user-friendly Materials and Shaders for the illustrative artstyle, and make the technical approach as artist-friendly to use as possible
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The project's theme and concept art was created in cooperation with the Illustrator Mar Schildmeyer.
The focus on the 3D Materials relied heavily on the usage of brush texture maps to control stylization which improved artistic control for the 2D artist in this project.
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The 3D models shown are rough blockouts for proof of concept purposes.
Unity's built-in Shader Graph was used to create the Materials which followed a smoothstep approach to create a margin between each shadowstep.
This also came with a change in the modelling workflow, as customized normal information was needed on corners and sharp edges of the object, in order to accomodate a smooth shadow transition.
The video visualizes the issue on a default cube (top left) and customized primitives (right cube and sphere).
As there was eventually water needed in the animation, the water shader was built to accomodate the stylization.
While vertex shader parameters controlled the wave movement, a procedural voronoi texture is creating stylized caustics which can be adjusted by colour and shape sizes.
Added normal maps create a sparkling effect when the sun is reflecting off it.
