Metamorphosis

Worked with artist Archit Vaze and 20 students on this project over the last few weeks. Essentially a 10day crash course in Blender that led to a finished 3min short. We will be screening it on 2 days at physical locations this month and then will do an online launch eventually. More updates including screening dates will be here and on the project's instagram page .

The Process:

Archit had been working on this for a while, and had done a colossal amount of the preproduction by the time he showed it to me.

So by the time we were discussing it, it was clear that we just needed to get into production mode. Srishti has what is called an interim semester, which as the name suggests is a semester that is between two others. The others are the teaching semesters and this is the one where practice is given a focus. So Srishti invites designers, artists and practitioners to come and conduct a project on campus that students can be a part of, thus learn by doing. 

Metamorphosis was thus pitched as an Interim semester project that students could sign up for. We got 20 sign ups.

Most of the students were using Blender for the first time. It took them a few days to get good at what they needed to do.
We started them off with the modelling, this was a unique and somewhat alien experience for some, though eventually they all got the hang of it. 

Next came a crash course in texture painting and shaders. This was a fairly abstract concept, that took some time and a lot of patience from everybody. As you may have guessed we were going for a very stylised #npr (non photo real) look, this required some amount of thought and planning to figure out what colors work, what kind of lighting would work etc.

Last was the animation and grease-pencil work. Here I took the students through basic motion tweening, shape keys and simple rigs. Our characters did not need complex rigs, in most cases even IK chains were not required. It was the perfect recipe for a beginner's introduction to 3d animation.

By now most of them were comfortable with Blender and were starting to see things coming together for the final film.

Various methods of tracking progress and wrangling shots were employed, but finally it came down to a whiteboard.

The sound design was handled by animator Ranjitha Rajeevan and Sound designer Sonal S. We went through an iterative process with them, and reworked the timing on some shots based on what was working with the sound track.
Essentially the final edit was executed by Ranjitha over a few sleepless nights.

Heres the team that worked on it:

UPDATE 27th Jan:
For the final screening we installed a led screen in a faculty's front porch so that the film could be seen by the local residents.


UPDATE February 10, 2023:

You can now view a trailer for the film on Instagram or below

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Metamorphosis Srishti Manipal Interim ’23 (@metamorphosis.blend)

UPDATE June 27, 2023:

The film was awarded the Quarterfinalist position for Best Super Short Film the SWIFF2023 festival.

Heres the mail we received today - 

Hello Metamorphosis,

Congratulations! On behalf of the SWIFF team, I am thrilled to share with you that you received an award for your film, Metamorphosis, at SWIFF 2023: Quarter-Finalist Award in the Best Super short film category. Among the films from 120 countries competing in this year's showcase, we are excited to award your film, Metamorphosis, with the Quarter-Finalist Award.

Metamorphosis was well received by all of our judges at

SWIFF, and we were highly impressed with your work.

Heres a neat announcement poster by Archit along with one that has some cool stats about the project and the team that was working on it.

3D Worlds - Showcase of My Students' projects

Here's a showcase of some work by my students done in blender. 

Steampunk Engineer's Workshop by Sanigdhaya on Sketchfab

A 10 year old's room! by MariGold on Sketchfab

Cel shaded - Ramen Bowl Model by Nilay Gomkale on Sketchfab

wall e and eva final diorama by vishnuprateek on Sketchfab

Hidden Library-Environment by Prish on Sketchfab

helicopter by disharamesh212002 on Sketchfab

Ancient forest Altar by sanjanau on Sketchfab

Mystical Jungle - LowPoly by Harsh Kamat on Sketchfab

TentEYEcles by sashadelilah on Sketchfab

fortune by yanamenacherry on Sketchfab

Castle with Kingdom by artistoshaunak on Sketchfab

Witch Far Travel

Gave the witch a way to travel over vast distances.. using maps and spells.

Heres the 3d scene, click to play and then drag and scroll to navigate 

Witch Far Travel by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

The Stakeout

 

After weeks of staking out this spot.. finally our subjects arrive.. lets take a closer look.

Hit the Play button in the player below and then, use the “K” key to play through,
or the annotations navigation controls(arrows on the bottom of the viewer) to look around.
You can further explore the scene by scrolling(zoom) or dragging(rotate) with your mouse.

The Stakeout by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

VVVV at a Workshop with Jonathan OHear

In Nov 2022, I attended a workshop with Jonathan OHear at Attakalari. This was an interesting workshop for me, as it had been a long time since I had sat down to learn something new. In this case something entirely outside my comfort zone - VVVV 


On each day Jonathan introduced us to byte sized concepts in lighting and coding, in what I as an educator, found was a well thought out and manageable lesson plan. 

We learnt how to program an ESP32 variant that had wifi and bluetooth as well as a battery pack(added by the support team Transmedia at Attakalri)


The workshop culminated in a show where we showcased our projects for the public.

This was pretty much my first time doing any electronics in over a decade, was pleasantly surprised with how simple things had gotten. 
We learnt to control DMX lights as well as LEDs and use sensor inputs from everything  from motion sensors to brain scanning devices.


I however opted to use a webcam(modified for infrared) to track a person's movement and use that to manipulate a 3d model that would generate particles, based on the movement.
Heres what that looked like:

Unfortunately I dont have any pictures or footage from the final day, but it was pretty much what you see above. The 3d model I used as the base object that would be the emitter of particles, was a 3d scan of my desk at SMI.

Desk at Work by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

This is the patch I eventually had.. 

heres a primer:

For anyone who may need this in future heres the setup I got working - DOWNLOAD
Have added a dampner to delay/soften the movement and color transitions.
Used the mesh from a 3d scan of my office desk as the emitter.

Heres a forum thread that was a big help to me.


On the last day we put on a little show for the public, allowing them to witness and interact with our creations.

This is the happy group on day 1 - 

Hope to run into them again!

Witch

Found the time to quickly doodle this for the weekly art challenge.

Witch by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

To know more about the challenge or the prompt list, check this link - Sketchfab Weekly - Sketchfab Community Blog - Sketchfab Community Blog



Modelled in Blender. Hex textures done in Inkscape.

Cyberpunk Catbed

Did a scan of our cat Pinku the other day while she was fast asleep.
This is what I did with that scan

The original scan had some bugs because the lighting was suboptimal, so large chunks were missing.

Pinku the cat by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab 

I took it to Blender to explore some repair techniques, but woundup building this contraption around it.

Heres the finished model..

Cyberpunk Catbed Porcelain by Chaitanya Krishnan on Sketchfab

You can also try it in AR with Snapchat - 
This link or use the snapcode below

You can also try it in Instagram with this code:

Heres a video of the process I followed to use the 3d scan of my cat in the model. It covers cleanup and using the decimate modifier to optimise the geometry.