Deece - Not Your Monkey
Role - Director, Edit and VFX
This was a bit of a passion project for me, created in my spare time over a couple of months. I'd just got myself a new PC so I really wanted to put it to work, rendering everything in Cinema 4D, using Octane and comping in After Effects.
I was a one man band on this project so I really had to pick my battles. I ended up sourcing models online to use for the statues. I then textured them myself using a mixture of images and procedural shaders. I wanted to create an Octane Material that I could apply to each model without having to tweak them individually.
The environments were a mixture of purchased and modeled assets. I wanted it to have a Melbourne feel so I modeled a lot of the Melbourne specific stuff myself.
I used Octane Scatter to scatter leaves throughout the scenes. It's a great tool for adding detail as the geometry is calculated at render time which speeds things up. You can also use textures to distribute the particles, so I was able to have more leaves towards the gutters for example.
I re-textured everything with Octane.
The second verse follows a single character as he breaks away from his statue and goes on an abstract journey. I used the Voroni Fracture object inside Cinema 4D to break away the surface of the statue. The energy glow around the character was created using Video Copilot's Saber plugin. I had a matte pass for the character so I used the Auto-trace feature in After Effects to give me mask paths that I could use to drive Saber.
I layered in a bunch of glows and optical effects using the GenArts Sapphire plugins. They were really fun to play with, below is an image that shows the Cinema 4D view-port, the raw render and the final composite.
Overall it was a great experience, I learned a ton about Octane and texturing. I can't wait to start the next project!
