Ausar

I wanted to share a personal project I've been working on focusing on modeling, lighting, and look development. It was super fun trying to match a real reference as close as possible in this project and going for realistic textures and lighting! This project was modeled in Maya and rendered in Arnold, with Zbrush used for folds in the sewing machine fabric, and Substance painter used for texturing. #3D #3dmodeli̇ng #animation3d #maya #autodeskmaya

Hello! Here's another dialogue shot that I worked on in October for the 11 Second Club challenge. I'm happy to have made it into the top 11 for this month! For this shot I wanted to focus on building momentum and telling a bit of a story within the short time. It was also fun to play with some different emotions. Hope you enjoy! Animated in Maya #3D #3danimation #animation3d #maya #autodeskmaya

Hello! This is one of my entries for the 11 Second Club Challenge from September. It's been fun challenging myself with monthly animations. Hope you enjoy! Animated in Maya #3D #3danimation #animation3d #maya #autodeskmaya

And that’s a wrap! Thank you for watching out Intrepid Thesis Takeover and thank you to everyone who made this project possible. This project took a huge team and a lot of work so we couldn’t have done this without each and every one of you. Special thanks to Harry Dorrington for always believing in us and keeping us on the right path. Also special thanks to SVA Alumni Society for funding this project and @nirarieli for giving us this team photo! Follow us here if you want to see more! @intrepid_thesis @anshul1107__ @paintbucketfool @senpaca #intrepidnation #dorringtonnation #proddjpharaoh

Here are some concepts for earlier characters that didn't make it to the final film! As Intrepid was once part of a bigger world and story, there are many other characters that haven't been explored yet and may eventually be seen in future projects.

Here's some of our early concept art. A lot of the characters were actually concepts from high school that were updated to match the film that is now Intrepid! In earlier versions of our film, we went more in-depth with the fishing village that surrounds the Catfish Steakhouse as well as the lake between the forest and the village. We also used a lot of the character art to define the range of expression for each character and wanted to get as close to their 2d design as possible. Our characters and environments each went through several iterations to achieve their desired looks, and we tried our best to stay as close to our reference as possible throughout the process. While it was a lot of detailed work, we wanted to make sure that everything could reach a cohesive, unique, and authentic style. Big thanks to @shrylia , @tomatolamp_ , @michelle.marakasherry , and @nvtl_0711 for helping with visual development!

And now, we have our lookdev feature. In order to achieve the semi-painterly look that we had envisioned, we needed to experiment with hand painted textures, procedural as well as hand placed cards and other stylized compositing techniques. The trees were driven by emission and color jitter nodes which made them especially difficult to shade and light. Set dressing the bar was challenging as we needed a plethora of elements to make the bar come alive. Each element was thought out and placed to contribute to the story. For lighting and compositing, the forest setting brought a whole new level of challenge. Dealing with dense shadows and keeping the overall mood consistent across shots took a lot of trial and error. The infamous Catfish Steakhouse was another challenge. The warm, rich tones of the wood had to feel inviting but not overpower the characters. Reflections and bounce light were tricky to balance, especially with so many natural materials interacting in the space. Keeping the magical vibe meant adding subtle glowing elements and soft volumetric through our lanterns that were carefully placed to make sure every corner of the restaurant felt lived-in and atmospheric. Each scene had its own quirks—whether it was fog/volume reacting weirdly to the light or subtle color shifts between renders that threw things off. It was a constant push to make sure everything felt cohesive, but in the end, we pulled through, especially with some last-minute color correction passes that really tied it all together. Huge thanks to @isalebasisa , @laixishen , @tienpham3d , @betty_lzq , @sanakakumanu , @7jingy , @nvtl_0711 , @sacristanclara , @natlo.art , @brlings and @averybuff_3d for helping with prop modelling and shading and thanks to @the_avery_pen for animation help! Another big thanks to @ian.exr for guiding us through color correcting our film, we couldn’t have done it without you guys!!!

Next up is our dragons! The Ninki Nanka is a dragon from Gambian folklore and is said to have the head of a giraffe, the body of a crocodile, and the belly of a hippo. It is also said that just looking at it could leave you💀. When creating the Ninki Nankas, we used a lot of different references, actually for animation. While initially taking the aspects and color palletes of a giraffe, crocodile, and hippo, for animation we also used snake-like dragon reference from more Chinese-like dragons and looked at lions and cats to create an appealing and consistent movement style for the characters. Design-wise, we also wanted to create a creature that was both dangerous and hunter-like, but also elegant and regal. In the Gambian mythology, the Ninki Nanka seemed to serve as more of a protector than a beast, and was a story used to protect the environment. People would use the story of the Ninki Nanka to ward off people who would seek to harm the environment for resources or money by scaring them away from areas where the dragon resided. Learn more about the Ninki Nanka below! /paintbucketfool/intrepid

Next up is our secondary characters and crowds! We had a lot of characters in this film and ended up with 9 unique character models by the end of the film, which was intended to keep our world feeling expansive and real. Huge thanks to @nvtl_0711 , @mattleung27 , @michelle.marakasherry , and @ryanjeanmski for helping with concept art and character modeling, rigging, and shading for the crowd characters. Our first character, Sullivan is the father of Juno in the film and husband of Bonabon (fishmom). He runs a bar in the Catfish Bay Creek called the Catfish Steakhouse, and if you look at him, Juno, and Bonabon, you can see that they all have the same emblem on their clothes and in certain shots in the bar. Sullivan used to be a hunter himself in his younger days, but decided to stay back in the bar after getting injured, leaving Bonabon to teach Juno how to hunt and help the family. The boar, while simple, was actually one of the most difficult characters to model, due to its hairs and unique shape.

Here are our main characters, Juno and Bonabon! Juno and Bonabon are a mother and son who travel through the creek as hunters to bring back food for their family bar, "The Catfish Steakhouse". In the fantasy world of Intrepid, humans and fish-humans co-exist with Juno being a half-fish person as the son of Bonabon. While Bonabon acts as Juno's wise mentor and teacher as well as a mother, Juno is often reckless and acts without fully thinking things through. A lot of research went in creating the designs for the characters with references from hunting and fishing gear from Vietnam, Gambia, and Benin along with other sources. Creating Juno's hair was difficult, to make it look stylized and painterly, but also curly and natural. We took a lot of reference from Spiderverse and Arcane for this and used tools in Houdini to find a custom way to generate hair for his character. For Bonabon, a lot of work went into developing the textures and design for her and we wanted her to feel elegant, wise, and sturdy while also keeping a similar feeling to Juno as far as design. A lot of her textures were based on catfish and koi fish and while Juno leaned more towards Gambian and Benin designs, she leaned more towards the Vietnamese side of things as far as references. When developing our visual style, we wanted to create animation that had a large range of expression like in Nimona, as well as the facial creases from Spiderverse and a painterly style similar to Arcane, but with more physical based shaders to keep lighting detail and texture detail for our fish characters.

Good morning everyone! It’s time for the Intrepid Thesis Takeover🐟⚔️! Our story follows the story of two hunters whose lives drastically change after encountering ancient dragons, and takes place in the fantasy land of the Catfish Bay Creek. Today we’re going to show you some behind the scenes for the process of creating our film, so stay tuned for more!

Good afternoon everyone!  Congratulations to the class of 2025, and thank you to everyone who came to the industry screening for the SVA Computer Animation and VFX thesis films yesterday to support.   While working on this film for the past 2 years, it was always exciting to be a part of creating a film with designs and characters that took inspiration from different cultures, while blending stylized and realistic 3d animation techniques into our storytelling.  Finishing this film was challenging to achieve, so I can’t thank my Co-Director Anshul Katkar and teammate Sarah Terceros, along with our extended team enough for bringing this ambitious project to life!    I also want to thank all of the advisors and mentors who guided us along the way like Michelle Marakasherry, Ollie Yao, MontaQue Ruffin, Derrick Forkel, David Han, Mark Osborne, and others, along with our sound and music artists, Victor Kong and Matt Villanueva.   Without all of you, this project wouldn’t be possible! - Ausar Johnson