The project consisted of one week of USD theory introduction, four weeks of pre-production, four weeks of production and one week of post-production.

We used Houdini’s Solaris as our pipeline and scene assembly software and rendered with Karma on our Hqueue render farm that consisted of our PCs and a few extras.

For revision and asset management we used Perforce with Helix Visual Client as the graphical interface.

Compositing was done in NukeX.

Sculpting was done in Zbrush

Modelling and UVs were done in Maya

Texturing was done in Substance 3D Painter

Animation data was recorded and cleaned with Qualisys Tracker Manager

Additional animation and mo-cap cleanup was done in Maya

Project organisation and planning was done with Miro Here is one of the earliest iterations of the film, this was a timing reference for the later animatic.

And here is the first animatic:

Clay was always a group effort we had a great team dynamic and we did not have a lead role for most of the project, but we decided that we needed a lead to break ties and keep everyone on track, I was picked as this “Lead”.

As the main Environment Artist I was to design the set or room that the film takes place in.

We wanted that the room would be more interesting that just a square and since Nick Park was born in the late 1950s this movie was to take place in 1960s-1970s England.

The main reference I found for a house that matched the location and time was this house.

We decided that since he had five siblings, he would not have his own bedroom but instead share one with one of his brothers. The room should therefore have two of every furniture so that they wouldn’t have to share. We also wanted there to be a dynamic between him and this brother, that he was a creative individual with art & crafts and painting while his brother would be more of a cold calculating brother. This was also to be reflected in the room, where Nicks side would be messy and organic while his brothers would be clean and tidy.

The film was to take place on the table so that we could limit the amount of environment work that was needed since we had a strict requirement that all assets had to be made by us, no downloaded content.

Here is the floorplan I created based of these requirements.

This was quickly turned into a block-in where you can see an early version of clay laying on the table for size reference.

I also decorated the scene with assets made by mostly Karolina Hesoun throughout the development, here is an early version and a later version of shot three.

As the main Lighting Artist together with being the main environment artist meant that it was I who took the storyboards and created a 3D scene with cameras from that. It was also up to me to make the scene feel alive and of course, beautiful. I did not consider myself to be a lighting artist during the production of this film but now with the wisdom of hindsight I was. I did not have a procedure to my lighting and simply went by gut feeling. I was later instructed to keep the brightest point of the image on the character which help for most shots but made the last one horrible since there was supposed to be a sunrise in the background. In hindsight we should probably have overruled that decision by our educator for that specific shot.

In the start of the project we did not have a technical director as we got a pipeline supplied to us from our educator, however this was out first time working with the USD workflow in Houdini and we quickly needed someone who understood it. Both me and Josef Allberg were then to learn the technical details and towards the end it was mostly me who understood the pipeline and could make changes to it.

I was also in charge of the project structure and organization. Interpreting what we were supplied from our educator into what we ended up using. This together with being the teams IT-support mean that I was managing our presence on the revision server. Managing submissions, missing files and general problems.

I also developed the more technical materials such as this clay material which shifts twelve times a second. This was supposed to be the main material on our main character who moved at 12 fps compared to the 24 fps of the film to feel like stop-motion. The material is meant to shift as if the animator had gone in and adjusted his pose and left small imperfections.
This material was sadly not used in the final version because of time constraints.

In the beginning of this project, we realized that we had no great animator, so we experimented with using motion capture and during our preproduction we did a recording session which proved to us and to our educator that it was possible.

During the project we had a total of three mo-cap recording session, I was the studio operator and calibrated and operated the motion capture studio and Johannes Rausch was our actor. After the sessions I would clean up the tracking data in Qualisys Tracker Manager and pass it along to Johannes Rausch and Josef Allberg who would then clean up the animation and adapt it to our scenes.

Sadly this project was running out of time, and we were not able to render out it in the desired quality and turned out very noise.

I would also like to thank Josef Allberg, Karolina Hesoun and Johannes Rausch for working with me during this project and team we composed was a joy to work in.
Check out their respective Artstation posts about clay here: