This project has a very special meaning to Vintage Culture and Zombie’s Director Paulo, who was keen on writing the script for this music video, too. The storytelling is about a man that doesn’t want to be seen as a hero at all. He’s just human, goes through ups and downs, tries to make it through the day, just living, dealing, and struggling with life, day by day, believing in himself. This man is Lukas, a.k.a Vintage Culture.

To add to this story, they wanted a fresh look, an outstanding visual, so Zombie mixed 3D with digital painting to achieve this differentiated piece of work.

I was invited by Muva Studio to work on 3D Research & Development, Characters Lookdev and and Texturing.

To me, R&D was a very interesting and deep pre-production phase were we had a month to test and validate style and workflow. It gave me the opportunity to apply different NPR (non-photo-realistic) styles I’ve been practing over the years, mixing Handpainted Textures, Grease Pencil Lineart and Handpainted Normals to achieve this unique look and interaction with the lighting.

I had some intense days researching and trying different styles to bring an innovative and interesting pipeline, stressing it out looking for effective workflows that could fit our team size and deadline. Our team kept testing and fixing possible problems that could broke production’s workflow to ensure it worked once production started, also making sure characters and props with Blender’s custom elements would work as expected fine into others softwares for rigging and animating.

I’m very pleased to sucessfully integrating my Blender’s workflow into this amazing project. Doing all my textures and Characters Lookdev in it, our team developed a mix of Eeve and Cycles workflow, bringing the stylized cartoon an extra touch of PBR Shader, like subsurface scattering and better light interaction.