Taking time off from their diet of television and film VFX work, the crew at Motif Studios in Cape Town dig in for a fun blast of character design and animation in this short film they call Gelato Roboto.

Motif director Craig Parker: “We wanted to experiment with doing a more concept digital art look while also finding as close a solution to rendering in real-time as possible. We also knew we wanted to do robots. Fighting.

“By using Blender Eevee for scene-building, lighting, and rendering, we were able to create a workflow with our animators in both Blender and Maya. Some additional character animation was done with a super DIY method of using an old X-Box Kinekt for motion capture.
 

“We wanted to experiment with doing a more concept digital art look while also finding as close a solution to rendering in real-time as possible.”

 
“One of the fun things that happened was Procreate received an update where importing 3D models into the painting program could be textured with brushes on an iPad Pro. We built a rudimentary city street, characters, and props this way that kept things extremely optimized.

“Once all our animation and basic blocking were complete, we opened up the scenes in Cinema 4D and created and refined all the camera moves. This was useful because you had a repeating performance and could reframe for timing until things had the rhythm we were going for.

“Once the textures were exported back to Blender, we went into additional lighting and rendering and did final compositing and grading in Adobe After Effects. Our turnaround time for the piece was about two and a half weeks from concept to finish.”
 
 

 
Production: Motif Studios
Director: Craig Parker
3D artist/animator: André Janse van Vuuren
3D animator: Linda Middleton
3D modeler: Galeed Majiet
AD: Craig Parker
Editor/compositor: Craig Parker
Producer: Jacques Bock

Sound design: Craig Parker
Music: Redoctopus (licensed)