November 23rd 2020 08:10:00am

Today’s video tutorial is a bit different in that it’s not the usual format I would normally do. Hence the breakdown term. This is really more of a hybrid breakdown and tutorial. I explain quite a lot of what I did to create the final FX work along the way.

Recently I had a wonderful chat with Nathan Thomas. He is the creator, director, animator of the Big Dinosaur series and owner of Little Mountain Animation. Nathan had reached out online looking for an FX artist to help out, when a friend of mine introduced us. After explaining what he was trying to accomplish, I was thrilled to figure out how I could donate some time to make it happen.

If you have not seen the Big Dinosaur series yet, I highly recommend checking them out. There are only three episodes so far, but worth every minute. Also the work I explain is a spoiler for episode 3, Donuts. You should definitely watch the episode first before watching my breakdown.

Big Dinosaur is a short animation series made with Unity. I found this interesting as I had not worked on making FX for any real-time game engines before. Thankfully it was a fairly smooth experience, and not much different than my normal workflow. I think this was due to us not having to be restricted by polygon counts as you might be when creating games.

SPOILER ALERT BELOW THIS POINT!!!

ONLY CONTINUE IF YOU WATCHED EPISODE 3 DONUTS.

LAST CHANCE.