When given the chance to do work for Adult Swim… you gotta go for it. This concept is the product of insane dreams of camping and charcuterie boards. S’moreo City is a land of marshmallow people, who are under siege by an alien force of cheese aliens. Yep - it’s that crazy. But out of the crazy comes tons of goodness.
This project featured many challenges I was tasked to oversee. Starting with developing what S’moreo City looked like, merging a comic book and cartoon-type appearance, I set out to build the “city” to serve as our home base. My next challenge was to begin building our alien invaders across all scenes. This involved multiple procedures, each differing based on the demand of the shot. From fluid and particle sims to cloth sims, to multiple character rigs, and from character sculpts through to face-melts… I built all of these systems to be dynamic, gloopy, and fun.
This project was fun and truly turned out as close as possible to the initial storyboards. Take a look below for more insights into the process on the job.
Credits:
Produced at Spillt
Story and Creative Director: Ryan Summers
Producer: Katie Mariani
Art Direction: David Rickles/Adam Schmisek
Principal 3d/Simulations: David Rickles
Character Animation/Mocap: Ryan Summers
Edit and Composite: Adam Schmisek
PROCESS
Character Development
City Look Development
The city was our foundation block for the entire piece. While it didn’t require an expansive build, getting the textured appearance was critical to bringing S’moreo City to life. We found references from Into the Spiderverse to traditional Pixar films and wanted to ensure a less-polished 3d look was achieved. Ultimately, I devised a multi-layered look using a base render, as toon-shaded render with integrated paint and marker strokes into the shading, and a third output using the traditional C4d toon shader to give a flatter output. These layers were then merged using a normal pass, isolating which directional portions we wanted to appear in any way at a given time relevant to the camera appearance.
Motion Process: Cheeze Aliens
Getting the Cheese aliens to work and move correctly was essential. And each shot required a subtly different demand on how the cheese interacted with the scene.
In the end, it wasn’t one technique, but several that became the final execution process. This included custom structure rigs, particle simulations, liquid simulations and pose morphs. While not used in each shot, each methodology was used and tested for the unique expression required within any frame.
Motion Process: Characters
As motion graphic artists and not character animators, the character portion of this film were a real challenge.
Ultimately, we merged sculpting and remeshing processes to build the characters and utilized Rokoko suits to motion caption the body's movements. For facial expressions, we relied on pose morphing the reactions and animating between them as the storylines progressed.
Final Styleframes
