Crossing Over -
Graduate Senior Thesis Film
Directed by: Gabi Fernandes, Trent Bellet, Denise Anger
Crossing Over is a graduate-level senior thesis film. This film was created in the span of almost a year. A 3D animated film that utilized EBsynth to create what looks like moving paintings throughout the film. This film was very experimental in that the goal was to create a stylized, painterly, almost hybrid short.
My Role
Co-Lead Texture Director
Working aside another Texture Director, we managed a team of 14 texture artists to create assets for the film. From research and development with Substance Designer, to creating stylized painterly texture workflows in Substance Painter.
Responsible for texturing environments, characters, and assets.
Crossing Over
Crossing Over
Office_Shot27
Temple_Shot13
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Temple Environment
Development Process
Early Development Process:
The directors knew they wanted to have a stylized-painterly texture for the environments. Since the whole film couldn't be done with EBSynth I had to conduct experiments with substance painter to see if we could make a workflow that created stylized textures without using EBSynth.
With trial and error and research I was able to come up with an easy workflow for our artists to follow. This technique was used for the majority of the props and characters throughout the short film.
Due to having beginner texture artists working on the film, I had to keep the workflow as simple as possible. The technique was to use a specific procedural texture with filters and masks in the layers and add paint strokes to make it look more painterly.
Using any other procedural texture would cause to make it look less organic.
Environment Assets
Characters - Responsible for all textures
Character Texture Development Process
Early Character Texture Development:
Early in the research and development process, we wanted to try to figure out how to create a painterly texture without hand painting each character.
First experiment was stylizing the normal maps. This didn't give the effect that we wanted.
The next test was stylizing normals in substance designer, and putting the textures under MAYA's toon shader instead of Arnold Renderer. This was getting close to what we wanted but we didn't want to render the environments in toon shader.
These are some of the troubleshooting issues we had to come across. The toon shader caused some problems as did the Arnold Renderer. Due to time constraints, we decided to go with hand painting the textures on the characters.
