Undone
"UNDONE is a half-hour, genre-bending, animated series that explores the elastic nature of reality through its central character Alma, a twenty-eight-year-old living in San Antonio, Texas. After getting into a car accident and nearly dying, Alma finds she has a new relationship to time. She develops this new ability in order to find out the truth about her father’s death."
-Official Amazon Prime Youtube channel
Undone has received critical acclaim. It has made it's way onto many "Top TV shows of 2019" lists, including those of the New York Times, USA Today, Indiewire, TV AV Club, Vanity Fair and Time Magazine. It has also been nominated for Best Animated Series at the Critics Choice Awards.
Undone is the first project I worked on after graduating from the HKU in 2018. I was originally hired as a junior layout artist, however I became a member of the 3D team within 2 months due to my extensive knowledge of blender and my ability to rapidly pick up different tasks. I modeled a toy car, did motion tracking for moving shots, animated chairs and doors, and, most importantly, textured sets using oil paintings made by our skilled team of traditionally trained oil painters.
We did not have any guidelines for how to approach this challenge, so I developed my own tricks to make the sets look like oil paintings. Usually, I would receive 1 or 2 oil paintings of a location to use for reference. I would then use bits and pieces from these paintings to texture the set, painting the hidden areas myself using custom oil paint brushes in Photoshop. If the deadline was particularly close I received help from an artist from the Touch Up department; they editted every 3D render digitally to make them look more like oil paintings, often adding more brushy textures and adjusting the details to make it more believable. Aside from the diffuse maps I would often also paint custom roughness maps using digital oil brushes, mainly for wooden floors, so that moving shots would look more convinving as well. Of course the lighting was also a very important part of the process; for several sets, I would combine "baked" lighting and 3D lighting, since 3D lighting alone would often ruin the oil painting illusion.
From October 2018 until May 2019, I was a 3D artist for Undone
Programs used: Blender, Photoshop
> 3D Layout; Texturing; Lighting; Rendering; Camera tracking; Animation
One of my first tasks when I joined the 3D team was to model the toy car in this scene.
In this shot, I was responsible for the 2 first rollercoaster segments (excluding the extras
behind the main characters). I modeled, textured and animated the rollercoaster carts.
In this scene, I was responsible for the camera tracking, projection mapping and lighting of the footage seen on the laptop screen. Note the reflections on the wooden floor; in order to achieve this effect, I created a roughness map using the original oil painting, so that the reflected lighting would look painted when in motion.
Using 2 oil paintings for reference, I textured and lit this room. Additionally, I was responsible for the layout of this entire scene.
I animated the chairs in this shot using the original live action footage as a reference.
Together with one of the Touch Up artists, I textured and lit this set over the course of a week, paying special attention to the painterly look of the reflections on the floor and cupboards. This environment from the final episode of season 1 was actually the first (and only!) 3D set that was not later editted by the Touch Up department, because the art director was so happy with the results.
By using bits and pieces from different oil paintings, I created a lush jungle filled with trees and flora for the background of this shot.