An on and off half a year endeavor to pay tribute to Chris Ramsay, whom I have to say started my obsession with puzzles and I've been having fun ever since!
Animated in C4D and Redshift, this project is all about my experience of getting a new puzzle in the mail, solving it, and putting it all back together. Of course featuring some of the nicest looking puzzles in Chris' videos.
One of the main things was the character, meant to be a representation of the player fiddling with the puzzles. It was interesting to find different ways of creating expression using a sphere and a ring, and how it could interact with the puzzles were tricky.
Another thing I wanted to do it create a unique non-realistic texture that still felt tangible. I used fields in order to control where the colours were, and it wasn't so hard but it came out quite nice!
Another learning curve that I had to go through was compositing. Since my machine can't really handle a ton of rendering and sometimes light can be very hard to art direct in render, I have to rely on compositing for small changes... and usually those small changes are actually massive changes. There was a lot of denoising and color grading, but also drastically changing colors and adding lights and glows. I rendered as many puzzle mattes as I could, and the render that comes out and the composited version has a lightyear of difference, and the results are 100 times better.
Here are a few of the final styleframes for your still enjoyment!
Thank you for watching!
Animated and directed by: Yat Fung Leung
Sound Design by: Noizlab Sound Design
