Leonard.hinz

Animation

Sci-Fi Short Film

01. August 2022

During my studies, I collaborated with a classmate on a significant project, which involved creating a 3D animated film. The film revolves around a small robot situated aboard a spaceship, striving to maintain the ship's functionality independently. The robot ensures flawless operation of various ship compartments to sustain the life support systems vital for two humans in cryo-chamber-like pods. My responsibilities included rigging the robot, character animations, intricate camera movements, and modeling the server room and the agricultural space room. Due to time constraints, we were only able to produce a clay render, along with a still frame rendered from the agricultural space room.

The entire project unfortunately was never completed 100%.

Introduction

The project was developed collaboratively by me and another student and divided into separate areas of responsibility. My main tasks included designing and building two key environments, the server room and the agricultural space room, as well as creating the robot rig, character animations, and camera movements. All work was done entirely inside Cinema 4D using Octane Render for lighting and visualization.

Agricultural Space Room

The room was designed to represent a plant preservation area within the spaceship. To create the feeling of an endless space, a few modular objects were modeled and duplicated multiple times across the scene. Plants were added at the final stage to bring life and contrast to the otherwise mechanical environment.

TEXTURED

CLAY

VIEWPORT

One modular section

Snippet from the clay render animatic

Server Room

The server room was designed as a key story moment in which the robot receives a warning alert and has to fix a malfunction inside the ship’s core system. The scene followed the same idea of creating a sense of endless depth by repeating modular elements throughout the space. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, no fully textured render was completed at that stage, but the layout and camera movement were developed to a clay-render level for the animatic.

CLAY

VIEWPORT

Animation Snippet Viewport view

Animation Snippet Viewport view 2

Snippet from the clay render animatic

Roboter Character

The robot character was modeled by Noah Seven. My responsibility focused on creating the complete rig inside Cinema 4D, including joint setup, mechanical controls, and animation testing. The goal was to achieve believable robotic motion while keeping the rig lightweight and easy to animate.

Xpresso-Graph