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To this day, how Kwame and I met still eludes me. I was in my second year of university and the epitome of antisocial. You would always find me parked at the farthest corner of the computer lab. The design department had recently bought several ‘Apple iMac Pro 27inch All-in-One Desktops’. I was smitten. Never had I used such fast computers. They ran Win XP and Win 7 better than Windows-based PCs. No one used Win Vista. I digress.
Client | Apes In Space |
|---|---|
Services | 3D Modeling, Animation |
Website | apesinspace.net |
With the new-found computation power, it was down to me and 3DS Max. I don’t know how, but word got out about the guy constantly experimenting with 3D animation software. Kwame reached out of the blue. He was working on a Ridsect TV advert and needed a cockroach rigged (adding bones to the 3D model to enable realistic movements) ASAP.
Stepping up to the challenge, I downloaded a 3D roach, browsed for hours for cockroach textures *gags*, and rigged the 3D model, all in Autodesk Maya. With that deliverable successfully done and submitted, a bit of working trust was established. He then gave me a new opportunity to ‘assistant art direct’ another TV ad he was working on for Co-operative Bank.
The third project is the focus here (finally).
Working on a self-funded animation project, Kwame entrusted me with the 3D modeling of the scene, and the rigging of the opening sequence camera. My ‘then’ toolkit only consisted of Maya and 3DS Max. Maya for modeling all props and 3DS Max for UV unwrapping and texturing. There was a reason for this. Each was awful at the other’s primary function, meaning I had to keep swapping between the two to try and stay sane.
The intro scene needed a 3D Manyatta donned with bones because an ogre lived there, and a patchwork of animal skins as the door. There was a forest behind the Manyatta and surrounding foliage since the ogre lived in a forest clearing. All these resources were to be created from scratch.
A bunch of days later, the modeling stage was concluded. I moved on to the fun bit of the process, rigging the camera movements. Fun as it was, the camera rigging took all of 1 hour. The last bit was the dreaded stage of unwrapping and texturing all the 3D models. All this was happening on an Intel Celeron processor desktop. The opportunity to access the university iMacs had long passed😢.
Very long story short, the intro scene was successfully delivered. I must add that Kwame tweaked the scene by adding better textures and higher-quality 3D foliage. The quality I’d provided was wanting as I was still a beginner in the world of CG. Nevertheless, it was a great learning experience, plus I got to have my name appear in the end credits of an award-winning animation.
Shoutouts and flowers to Kwame and his team for their recent release, Twende on Showmax.
Watch The Legend of Ngong Hills animation below.
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