Connor MacPherson

About the work

Matchmove – This project required me to fully track and matchmove a live action plate using industry practices and show my ability within the area of Matchmoving. The process I undertook included analysis of the live action plate, tracking the points of interest using PFtrack, cleaning up the plate and removing tracking markers in Nuke, and finally performing geometry line up in Autodesk Maya. Once I had achieved all these stages I was able to get creative and start to give the shot a narrative. I decided on a robot testing site narrative with logos on the back of each robot indicating the “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” proverbial principle, but with ‘speak no evil’ amended to ‘do no evil’ as I felt this worked better for a narrative including robots.

Creature – This project tasked me with looking at the world from a more evolutionary stance and analysing nature with a zoological and anatomical mind frame while trying to apply these fields of research onto mythological creatures. I chose to create a Pixie with great influence from the Harry Potter franchises film depiction of Pixies. Once I had decided on my creature, I started to plan how I would sculpt it in 3D using Zbrush. I began by making a base of Zspheres and building upon that as my base mesh. Once I was happy with the silhouette and overall form of my base mesh I began to sculpt detail. This is where the evolutionary and zoological research most influenced the look of my creature and the biology that would shape muscle groups and skin textures. Once the creature was sculpted I exported the geometry into Maya and manually retopologised using the Quad draw tool. Once this was done I UV’d my creature and then started rigging the creature to enable me to animate it in realistic ways. Once I was happy with my rig I took the creature into Substance Painter and started to paint the creature ready for render.