Favourite Animated Moments - Meet Buck

Created by 4 students from French VFX school Supinfocom, over the course of 12 months (6 months preproduction, 6 months production.)Meet Buck has to be my favourite short of 2011. Everything from the texture painting, character animation, and even staging just oozes such fluid, yet electric energy, a kind that is rarely found in any 3D animated short, never mind a student produced film.

Although produced entirely in 3D, any frame from Meet Buck could easily be mistaken for a 2D painted image.

When asked about their choice of art style, the team behind the film said, (translated from French) "When you look at art books, many things are lost in the final 3D rendering... We want to stay close to the illustrations."

Of course, lighting such a strikingly graphical film had it's own set of challenges. Conventional lighting techniques often rendered much of the painted textures unreadable. In order to overcome this, some shading was painted into the characters texture, to define volume, and any other lighting, such as rim lighting, shadows etc, were rendered separately in their own passes, and finally composited together.


Diffuse, ambient, highlight, rim, and shadow passes were rendered separately, and composited together.

Of course, the animation deserves a mention too. The film is full of broken joints and smears, not unlike a Warner Brothers Looney Tunes short.

The above sequence sees the main character Buck being chased by his girlfriends overprotective, game hunter, father. As Buck slips and rumbles his way to escape, he buckles and bends from one extreme position to another. Brilliant use of offsets and broken joints, coupled with added smears, which look like may have been added as a hand drawn effect, much like the rest of the films effect work, I think pull of this frantic, yet slick chase scene brilliantly.As I come to the end of the AP2 module, I'm heavily thinking about my own film project for later this year. Meet Buck has definitely got me thinking about trying something different, jumping out of my comfort zone a little. If anything, I feel I've been playing it a little save with my animation so far, time to break out and try something new and exciting...

Making of insights and images taken from French website 3DVF, translated version can be found here http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.3dvf.com%2Fdossier-765-1-rencontre-avec-equipe-meet-buck.html