Twitch: Loadout has won CGRecord | RebusFarm Reel of the Month #1

[ #RebusFarm #ROTM ] CG Record and RebusFarm has announced that the Twitch: Loadout shortfilm has won The Reel of the Month Award. Directed...

[ #RebusFarm #ROTM ]CG Record and RebusFarm has announced that the Twitch: Loadout shortfilm has won The Reel of the Month Award. Directed by Sava Zivkovic - a director and CG Artist based in Belgrade, Serbia. Twitch: Loadout is a personal passion project, designed as a case study to further develop skills and understanding of concept art, modelling, animation, music and sound. Check out the movie below!

>> Submit your Reel or film on CGRecord TV to win CGRecord | RebusFarm Reel of the Month

CGRecord has chance to have an interview with Sava Zivkovic and the team behind the movie.

CGRecord: Hello Sava Zivkovic! Please tell our reader about the idea to start Twitch: Loadout and please tell us how your team comes up with the idea to create such great movie!
Sava Zivkovic: Thank you so much for the award, this was a nice surprise and it really means a lot to all of us involved, so thank you again on the behalf of the whole team
The idea was to try myself at something different than what I usually do in everyday work, which is Archviz and Motion Graphics. When we first started on this project it was supposed to be just a simple modeling exercise, but as we developed the concept further it snowballed into something bigger. The first impulse was to create an animated short, but that idea was quickly discarded simply because of the time and resource we didn’t have. The strip down version of the short was to create some sort of a trailer, and it just so happens that the concept artist who worked on the character design, Milan Nikolic, has a twitch stream. So we eventually settled on creating a title sequence, acting as an opener for the stream itself.

CGRecord: The most challenge your team has when working with the movie. How to deal with that?

Sava Zivkovic: The most challenging aspect for me was the asset creation. I’ve never had hands on experience with creating character models for production before, so all of the things involved in the modeling process like good topology for rigging, uv layout and so on were really challenging to tackle.

Asset Creation Process

Dealing with any challenging task just requires a lot of time in my opinion. You’re basically learning something new, something you’ve never done before, so naturally the learning curve is much greater. The only way to get past it is to stick to it and believe in the final product. This comes easy when you’re passionate about what you do and when you’re surrounded with people who have similar goals.

Motion Capture/Animation

CGRecord: Do you use any problem with Rendering time? Should you try Farm Rendering service?

Sava Zivkovic: This must be the first project I’ve worked on where render time wasn’t a problem:) I’ve recently switched to Octane as my main render engine, mainly for its incredible speed. In my opinion it’s still not as well versed render engine as vray but it enables me to do projects I would not even think about tackling with vray. Octane is built for speed and true, you do need a powerful pc in terms of gpu power to make the most out of it, but if you compare that price for the same cpu processing power you’re looking at much less expensive pc build that acts like a small render farm.

For this particular project I’ve used 4x Evga GTX 980 Ti Hybrid graphics cards, they are all water cooled so overheating is not an option and they make Octane fly. The whole project was rendered in full HD with 3d motion blur and dof, with an average render time of just 3 minutes per frame. That amounts to 3 days of rendering for the whole project, and that’s just insanely fast in my opinion:)

CGRecord: What you've learned after done that great film? Any advice for short film maker?

Sava Zivkovic: Aside for the technical skills all of us acquired along the way, the most important thing for me is learning to work with a team. Animation and film making is a collaborative process and I can’t stress enough the importance of your team.

Milan Nikolic developed the concept for the character

As for some general advice I would say whatever you’re doing just stick to it, day after day, and you’ll get better. If you’re working with friends, listen to their suggestions, the feedback you’ll get is invaluable as you can easily get blind and not notice the obvious solution to a problem.

The texturing on this project was another huge learning experience. Having always textured my models directly in Max, I wanted to try a different approach and experimented with Quixel Suite and Substance Painter. Both are amazing in their own right and you can achieve the same result, but as always it goes down to personal preference, and for me the choice was Quixel due to the familiar interface of Photoshop, and the material/brush/mask preset library it contains gives it a slight edge over Substance.

CGRecord: Do you have any Idea/Plan for near future? Any excited thing in mind to share us right now?

Sava Zivkovic: We always have ideas floating around in our minds, or some projects in development. I’m currently taking a break from work and focusing on my personal projects, trying to learn new things. But we have had an interesting opportunity come up as a direct result of Twitch: Loadout. It’s a similar but a bit bigger project that I’m currently developing with Milan Nikolic and Iz Svemira, but unfortunately we can’t share more details at the moment:)! Thank you!
Thank you Sava and team! Let's check out the Making of video

If you want to see more details about the project you can check Twitch-Loadout on Behance
Credits:
Direction/Animation – Sava Zivkovic
Character Design – Milan Nikolic
Modeling/Texturing – Sava Zivkovic
Music/Sound Design – Iz Svemira
Motion Capture – Take One
Additional Character Animation – Take One
Behind The Scenes Coverage – Milos Nikolic
Tools: 3ds Max, Octane Render, Quixel Suite, Adobe Suite, premade models from Evermotion and Video Copilot

Main Sponsor: RebusFarm GmbH
The Sponsor for Reel of the Month - RebusFarm is a leading render farm service which instantly provides you with 5000 XEON CPUs to render your animations and still-images. Winning Reel of the Month means you will get 350 RenderPoints worth 350 Euro from RebusFarm.

Please Submit your Reel or film on CGRecord TV to win CGRecord | RebusFarm Reel of the Month !
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