I made a new Quill file and imported the concept art and reference photos of different stadiums. Most of the film happens in the stadium, so I built it first. Nothing was too tight yet, leaving room for me to improvise while I animated. That way, it was clear what assignment I had for each day. I chose to sketch those extra storyboards on stickers and put them on a calendar. There are only nine shots in the color storyboard, but the film has far more shots. I was then able to import all the images into Quill as references.Īfter the color storyboard, I drew a black and white one as a kind of production schedule. I made one color key for each environment: stadium, farm, tv station, space, and all the exterior drone scenes. All colors are final once you export them from Quill. The color decision has to be made very early on, because you are “texturing” your model as you paint in Quill.

Zeyu Ren: Once I had a basic idea of the story, I started to sketch out the storyboard using Procreate on Ipad. Some of the process is shown in making-of footage at the bottom of the article. Below, Ren walks us through the production. Light It Up took six weeks to make: two weeks to build all the assets, two to animate, and two for the rendering and compositing. As Ren tells Cartoon Brew, “I want Quill to be an industrial tool for artists, for animators who make 3d animation.” The result is a kind of proof-of-concept for integrating Quill into animation pipelines. He once again used Quill to animate, but assembled and rendered the film in Cinema 4D to give it a more cinematic feel. Vr has computational limitations that restrict what can be done visually.

Although it was presented as a conventional film, to be watched on laptops or phones and not a vr headset, its footage was entirely captured inside Quill.

It made waves in the tech community when he released it early last year. After some early freeform experiments with the tech, Ren made Wired, a wistful short which introduced a new narrative ambition to vr animation.

4d animation