Hot Mugs

Hot Mugs is a 3D animated short film about the day of Barry, an ex-adventurer bearista, working in a forest serving any customers who crave for some hot delicious coffee.
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I worked on this 6+months school project as the producer, technical artist and lead animator with 4 other artists. It was a blast working on this project, the main inspiration of the art style was AFK Journey and It was my first time taking up the producer and technical artist role. Taking the producer role is tough, gathering the team to share a common goal and understanding how to delegate tasks need plenty of planning, leading this project has been a great opportunity to step out of my comfort zone to improve my communication and leadership skills. Not all things will go according to plan but it is also important to adapt to the circumstance and ask for assistance when required.

As the technical artist, I had to experiment the toon shader in Maya and lighting functions, I was able to learn more about the features like controlling the Hue/Saturation level and the lighting relationship features. I had learned to utilize the Advanced Skeleton(Maya plugin) to rig two of our main characters, it has provided fast and efficient rigging, however there were hurdles and limitations to the plugin that required me to improvise and adapt around the Bearista's claw hand for the rig to work. Since it was my first time dealing with the physics simulation, I had my teammates assist me with the liquid simulation and coffee beans simulation, this has given me enough time to animate and fix the apron Ncloth simulation.

As the lead animator, I worked on the animatic and animated all of the animation block-ins and 17 out of 20 of the final animated scenes.

The Team!
Liao Yi - Environment Artist / 3D Generalist
Elizabeth Tan Zi Xuan - Environment Artist / 3D Generalist
Toh Jia Yi - 3D Character Artist / 3D Animator
Natlie Gunn Hui Yi - Concept Artist / 3D Character Artist