Kutoppen: På sporet
Art Director & 2D artist - Character & Set design
I was brought onto this project from the beginning while working at Qvisten Animation, helping build upon the look of the first film and turn it into a wintery wonderland. I was mostly working as the only designer. All work below is done by me unless otherwise stated.
The film was directed by Will Ashurst
The farm
The actual Kutoppen farm is a centerpiece in the franchise, and we had to upgrade certain elements of it for this 3rd film. I worked a bit specifically on how to upgrade the farm as well as individually with how we were going to go about making all the singular nature assets like trees, grass etc.
Sets in the world
Defining the rules for the large nature sets
A lot of the work consisted of working on specific assets, but also larger scale on defining rulesets and guidelines for how to go forward with populating larger areas. These are some examples of how that work went about.
Trees - R&D and visual design
I worked on developing a new technique for the trees that would align with the directors vision. Ultimately we settled on a combination of procedural generation in Houdini combined with manual adjustments. The pine trees were made with a combination of general procedural techniques and L-systems. I set up the initial system and asset.
The train tracks landscape
The set design of the landscape around the train tracks was a particular challenge as it was too huge to fully populate with nature assets, and we knew that we’d be going pretty close to the ground at times, judging from the storyboards. I set up a few mockups, inlcuding the 3d animation below to better evaluate how much background and howclose to the ground we could potentially end up. At that point there was no rigs or animators attached to the project.
Another challenge was how to deal with what’s outside the train windows at all times. We considered just going with an overexposed white, but figured that it would suit the look better to have something visible. I set up a 3D scene of cards within Nuke as a proof of concept for how simple we could keep it and still have it be believable.