Early on I did some internal look tests to see the amount of complexity we would need for the campaign, whilst simultaneously trying out a new look I had in mind. The style was based on the previous look dev I did with Mindbender on the launch of Farm Heroes Super Saga, but it proved to be more complex due to our main humanoid character (Stella). Also the characters such as Wilbur the Cat and the Ghosts needed to have 2D animated eyes and wrinkles on top to so this project was way harder than Farm Heroes.
Here is the base I used, the internal team liked the simple look on it. But I wanted to differ us from the launch of BW2.
These were done by Mindbender where we tried to see how much we could solve of the 2D look on a shader level.
This was one of my styleframes I pitched early on, trying to give us a narrow palette of blue colours that washed out the environment, and a strong key light that gave a rimlight on our heroine to make her pop. I was also experimenting of having some filters treating the environment to give it a more painterly look.
We were also tasked with creating a TVC to be aired in the states with only 1 months deadline. So sometimes you need to break the established 2D look since to meet the deadline we decided to create a frozen moment. And since flat 2D shading can be a bit boring to look when it is only camera movement I decided that we should change the look for this spot.
During the project it was also my responsibility to make sure the three different vendors we used (Mindbender, Expanse & Swiss) received the correct assets. Since all these studios utilized different rendering engines and pipeline tools it was a full-time task to make sure the look remained intact throughout the work of the campaign.
Here I did some slight sculpts to showcase the need for simulated cloth and if we should aim for realistic hair or not.
Here is where we ended up; Flat colours with subtle shadowing, and always a dedicated rim light. On top of that we had to do some 2D painting for the eyes to give it the illusion of 2D animated character.
These were my first treatments of the spheres, the look of them changed as I sent them to external vendor and had to supervise them to keep the look consistent throughout.
The ghost illustrates the process quite well, to emphasize the emotion we hired 2D animators to draw in the line work to make it more 2D-esque
These are where we ended up in the end, note that we rendered all in square to do cropping throughout. We always ended up doing thousands of re-edits and re-crops for all of the videos to work on all platforms, so it was also always a task to make sure the framing worked in every aspect ratio.