Introduction
At freestyle, all seniors are expected to complete our Zenith Projects before graduating – but what is the Zenith Project? The Zenith Project, as I see it, is our senior thesis where we’re required to pick up a topic of our own and create our own project around it. It’s a project to demonstrate our skills and our ability to grow them even further.
For my Zenith Project, I chose to do a 3D animatic of the song Dead Mom from Beetlejuice the Musical. I adore musicals and Beetlejuice has become one of my favorite ones, on top of that I fell in love with Lydia’s costume design. My completed project will be the last minute of the song and I aim for it to be fully animated with some effects as well.
I’ve never tried to make a highly detailed model before this and I aim to use new software, blender, in order to sculpt and build my model. This is also the first time I’m animating something this long, with full lip-sync and body movements all done myself. I plan to also create an entire set and some props to sit in the background. I’m incorporating the skills I’ve learned in my animation class by animating through Maya, using the techniques I’ve learned in class such as blend shapes, and painting/baking the model in Z-Brush and Substance Painter.
Process
Process Photos
Completed Product
Zenith Reflection
If I had the opportunity to redo this project, I would redo so much. I spent a lot of time working on small details that I later had to ditch due to complications. I had created hands, which lost all their details and had to be nubs instead due to remeshing. Then I used vertex paint which I couldn’t use outside of blender, so my work had to basically be scrapped and redone again. I wish I had time to do a proper rig as well, with a functional moving mouth and movable hands; however not only did I run out of time but I hadn’t planned for it ahead of time and it would’ve made rigging my character a nightmare. I also wish I had begun modeling my character much earlier like I had planned, however, I procrastinated until the Zenith Project actually started. I wish I could’ve spent more time on my project to allow it to look more polished and give it the care I wish I could’ve put into it. However, I’m still proud of my Zenith outcome since it’s the first large-scale animation I’ve made, the duration of the animation and creating an entire character model and set really challenged me in a new way. It was up to me to not only complete the work on my own, but for any last-minute problems I had to decide what the best course of action to tackle it was all by myself.