CoMotion 2024

CoMotion is an annual student-led motion graphics conference at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Under the direction of Kyle Switzer and Muskaan Sethi and with the rest of the branding team, I created elements for a few shots in the title sequence: the stylized DNA and fern in the observation section, using my expertise with stylized shading.

Creative Director: Kyle Switzer, Muskaan Sethi

Lead Animator: Isabelle K Winarto

Animators: Jiaru Yang, Lauren Neu, Linxuan Wang, Sean Shelton, Tzu Kai Lin, Valentina Gil Duque, Xinyue Gu, Davis Hardy, J.C. Petrofsky, Phirada Kanjanangkulpunt, Qi Qi

Lead Designer: Tiffany Tedy

Designers: Xinxun Liao, Phyllis Zhao, Haze Nguyen, Danna Macias, Cynthia Soe, Chaoran Xu, Sarah Wellman

Lead Graphic Designer: Reem Hinedi

Producers: Rachel Golla, Alexis Dow

Graphic Designers: Aatreyi Singh, Alessia Piccoliori, Charlotte Beck, Claire Lin, Emily Strycharz, Gauthier Bossuyt

Producers: Punasa (Bee) Sihsobhon, Sophia D’Alleva

Experiential: Eliezer Garcia Gazaui, Jinkyu Kang, Gabriel Medina, Hannah Ford

Web Developers: Amadeus Cameron, Isabelle Duffner

Composer: Seth Marques

Fern

The fern shot, designed by Haze Nguyen, is meant to look like a researcher's pen drawing. Unlike the other glamorous 3d shots with realistic lighting, the fern needed to look like a pen drawing. It was a welcome challenge hiding any uncanny CG-ness from the shader and animation.

First Geonodes tests

This project was the perfect opportunity for me to learn Blender's new Geometry Nodes. This allowed me to create a procedural and parameterized fern for quick iteration and art direction, and passing attributes to the pen shader like custom normals.

Using the new Repeat Zone feature in Blender 4.0, I created a custom curve generator for a curling stem and looped over creating the leaves along the stem so they could be animated individually, unlike instances. I reused the curve generator for the leaf branches and sub-branches, then lofted the sub-branches into a mesh for the leaves.

Stylized Shader

The fern needed to look like a 2d drawing and fit with all the 2d and fake 2d elements animated by Lauren Neu. I created a custom shader which instanced a line texture 128 times at random offsets, then used carefully tuned shading and custom normals passed from geonodes to mask each offset.

Default Shading

Custom Shading

Default Normals

Custom Normals

This heavily tuned shading and custom normals is what makes this kind of shot much harder than with a universal tool like Maxon's Sketch and Toon.

Final Look

The custom shading mask is put into the stroke generator and more effects are added like knots distorting the UVs.

Breakdown of Outlines

The outlines created with Geonodes use many techniques like duplicating the mesh behind, instancing strokes along the stem, and analytically drawing a line along the leaf edge

The mirrored curve was generated the same as the fern with extra lines drawn from the root to points along the stem. In the final title sequence the raw frames were composited by Tzu Kai with the other animated elements by Lauren Neu.

DNA

The stylized DNA shot, also designed by Haze Nguyen, needed to look the same as the other paper observation scenes, but look 3d enough to match cut from Davis Hardy's previous DNA shot.

Stylized Shader

Like the fern, I used custom shading to control my stroke generator. Each shading region and was determined by UV position.

Default Shading

Custom Shading

With Hatching

Unlike the fern, the outlines were created with Blender Grease pencil. The outlines and hatches were rendered separately, roughened in After Effects, then turned in to Tzu Kai for compositing.

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