Project Orange

owl moped rider

owlbutton
  • Genre: 3d Animation
  • Year: 2010
  • Duration: 3 years
  • Team: 1

6 minutes of the life of an ordinary moped

Thank you!

This project was the starting point of my 3D career. In the beginning the plan was just to create a little thank-you picture for my granddad, for lending me his moped for 2 years, but in the process it evolved into something much bigger.

(high resolution version: ProjectOrange.jpg [1.07 MB])

The result is an animation film that is almost 6 minutes long and explores various ideas I had in mind at that time. For the premiere we booked a room in the Rauch Club in Feldkirch, for which I also designed posters, flyers and special T-shirts. The premiere finally took place on November 6th 2010, it was a night where neon-t-shirt wearing boys became men.

Behind the scenes

Every day after school I would come home and start drawing another part of the moped on paper. Drawing it first forced me to think about the objects shape which was really helpful when modelling it later.

Some of them were quite small and easy to draw/model, while others required learning completely new workflows. Examples for more challenging modelling tasks were wires & cables, tires and of course the owl.

if all you know is a hammer...

By that time I already did most of the basic modelling tutorials in 3ds max (the ones that appear if you hit F1). Especially the concept of spline based modelling appealed to me, so I created most of the models by drawing lines in top & side view and then apply a skin modifier to generate the shape.

Of course this approach was very tedious, but I simply didn't knew better at that time. So I continued modelling everything using splines, even geometry that would normally just require tweaking a standard sphere or cylinder. Guess high school also influenced me here, as we always had to draw top or side view plans.

did you also catch sight of it during the animation?

work in progress

Here are some of the textures that had to be drawn:

the glowing red owl robot is inspired by Gurren Lagann

One of the rather good ideas I had was to let the robot stay in place and move the ground instead when animating:

And this is how the cannon actually looks in 3d space when shooting:

This was an idea that never made it into the film:

the robot would shoot an arrow at the monster instead of using his exhaust pipe

credits

Credit where credit is due. In memory of our beloved dog & family member Sally