Interactive Wall
For my undergraduate degree I had initially focused on character animation. After transitioning into working more extensively on visual effects, I missed the hours spent tweaking key frames and bringing images to life. When working on the interactives for Aquarium of the Pacific I was given the opportunity to animate an array of critters for a huge underwater wall that visitors would be able to touch and interact with. I was provided with pre-animated models, but ultimately had to re-key the majority of them to illustrate a more realistic and natural loop of movement. One amusing obstacle I faced was finding a reference video for a fast-swimming tuna fish.The attractive end result was that animals would appear when a visitor taps on a bubble providing an educational and immersive experience.
Along with sea critters, some of the bubbles bring up larger animations such as underwater turbines. I animated and re-textured them in order to depict a more blended image with the ocean floor. I composited grime and barnacles to present a passage of time while also projecting a caustic light beam onto the animations. Additionally, I animated a sea kelp model by using a wind deformer in C4D. I initially tried to animate it like hair, but was not getting the results I wanted. I created caustic lighting for the kelp by means of animating a plane with holes in it and then shining a light on top of that plane. I then took the rendered kelp and composited it into some footage of a kelp forest to prevent the scene from feeling sparse.
Aside from the underwater wall, there is also an interactive for visitors to explore the futuristic and sustainable city my team and I developed. We used models mainly from Turbo Squid and re-textured them to fit our vision. I altered the geometry of some the buildings in order to provide a better representation of what a sustainable structure could look like. Some of the issues when creating the content were compositing water as well as making it feel like the visitor is flying through the city (without making them nauseous). We had to incorporate a few creative camera moves and re-time a few shots to achieve this, but the result was a successful one that I am extremely proud to say I was apart of.
Opening: May 2019
Location: Aquarium of the Pacific - Long Beach, California
My Contribution: Animation, editing, early mock up, texturing and lighting, character animation, rendering, compositing
Software Used: Cinema 4D (Arnold), After Effects, Photoshop, Premiere
