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Afternoon Memories

Afternoon Memories

Daniel Molina
September 17, 2018
2 Comments

I've been a cartoon lover my whole life, so I thought that I could make an interesting homage to my favorite childhood cartoons using my daily tools. The ones that you see are characters that fed part of my life and imagination, fascinated with several characteristics of both design and personality I tried to reflect them in a 3Dimensional world looking for harmony between composition, color, and camera handling.



I always try on my personal projects to challenge my self, and try to learn new tools or to take a step deeper into the ones that I already know. My fanart journey started with first making a list of the characters that could be interesting, or a challenge to create in 3D, there is a ton of characters in my list, but I knew that I have to make a shortlist because it will be an interminable project if I don't establish goals. So the idea was to maintain their cartoon style, in the making a enjoy exploring and experimenting with new techniques, so in the making of the first one I knew I wanted to use real textures for the ambiances, and make the textures for my characters as details as possible. I also wanted to try to paint some of my textures because I know that's one of my weakness in 3D. As a personal touch, I wanted them to have some more realistic eyes, a list with Gatomon and Pechan, for kero I always saw him as a doll, so I tried to give them that texture and some buttons for eyes.


So my primary tool was Cinema 4D, I used to model all the characters, they where made in a traditional box modeling way, I start with a cube, and then I extrude a given shape until I get what I desire, I use a guide various stills I extract from the original cartoons to identify their proportions from different angles, definitely the hardest to model was Pechan, because his shape its so fluid and changing, it was hard to get a good reference image, but I was really happy with what I achieved.
After the modeling I started to make the textures, for Gatomon and Dog, the primary challenge was to make some good looking hair, it was a long journey because of render times, Kero I figured out with Cinema 4d reflection channel, I used their Woven Cloth reflection map and that did the trick, as for Pechan was the one with I challenge my self the most, because I wanted to try Allegorithmic Substance Painter, the skin texture was done with their skin shader and painted on top some more details with their amazing brushes, also I needed to provide the painting software a nice Uv mapping, and that was a ton of leaning, because Uvs are my other weak point.
For Reptar skins, I also wanted to try something new, so I experimented a bit with the sculpting tools of Cinema 4D, the result I got was really pleasant for me.
For the post-production, I used After Effects for creating the depth of field in Gatomon's image, and photoshop for post coloring and playing a lot with the different passes that Cinema 4D gives me, I used some luts with very low opacity for achieving some sort of filmic look. All the rest of the images where post produced also in photoshop, except Pechans where I tried to correct and stylize color with Black Magic Fusion, the reason its because I really want to learn more about composing software.

The response was a nice one, first from my friends and people i know, my followers on instagram also enjoyed a lot the images, as i was unveiling each one of then everyday. Pechans

I definitely learned a lot doing this project, i improved a lot my uv unwrapping skills, my rigging skills and also a little bit my painting skills. I ended up introducing two new applications to my arsenal of software, and i totally fell in love with Substance Painter.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to read about my work, hope to post the second part anytime soon, if you have additional questions, you can always find me on instagram or twitter as @chepetusa, or you can write me at [email protected], its always a pleasure to talk about 3D and animation.

Daniel Molina

Hello, I'm a graphic designer who is in love of 3D and animation, addicted to video games and movies, co-founder of Mosh an animation studio based in Guatemala, where i have worked animations and videos for different types of clients. Always open to any kind of collaboration or just chat you can find me as @chepetusa or write anytime at [email protected]

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