Gilded

After giving up my access to Autodesk Maya in late 2024 I began the slow but necessary task of migrating my 3D software usage to Blender (and, to a lesser extent, Unreal Engine). After spending some time practicing with its features in the spring of this year, I decided to make a short animated film to see what sort of standard I was now capable of.

The story of Gilded began as a simple motion test of a horror/fantasy character crawling along a hallway, but I looked for interesting ways in which I could potentially expand this into a narrative.

The model making work was done with a mixture of Zbrush and Blender 5.1's hard and soft surface tool sets. The textures were nearly all achieved with a mix of photographic elements and the texture painting tools. I autorigged the characters using Adobe Mixamo and the rendering was done using the Cycles engine. Lip-syncing for the speaking character in the end scene was achieved using Cartoon Animator 5. The whole project took less than two months (during my spare time) from conception to completion.

The set used for the filmmaking was as functional as I could reasonably make it, with space for the characters to move around and explore.