Environment Render Layers Breakdown

This is the main environment for the film, a sushi restaurant.
I finally figured out how to work with render layers, it took me a while. In the film, there are some major passes such as color pass, ambient occ. pass, lighting/reflection pass, specular pass, and a alpha channel for the specular pass. Once the character is included, I will add another specular pass for the character.

Layout: Howard Cheng
Modeling: Willy Kao, Pornsin Sooksanguan, David Reyes, Alfredo Lozano
Texturing: Pornsin Sooksanguan, David Reyes
Lighting: Howard Cheng
Rendering: Howard Cheng

Buki - Character Design

Here is a simple character sheet of our character. Originally, he was a salmon sushi without feet. During the production, we decided to add arms and feet to the character in order to solve some concerns that we had. Finally, we made this decision which turned him into a shrimp sushi.

Character Design - KiJeon Nam
Character Concept - Howard Cheng
Addtional Character Concept - David Reyes, Stephanie Reyes



The model of Buki was done around the end of Fab. Rigging took us a long time to finish. We faced a lot of weird problems which we had to solve them ASAP.
Buki is a small character. Basically, his face is his whole body. It is important to let Buki be as expressive as possible because everything is depends on it. We have over 100 blendshapes. Additionally, there more than 10 facial clusters to just tweak the blendshapes.

Character Rigging/Blendshapes: KiJeon Nam
Character Rigging/Controls: Howard Cheng

What is Buki?

Buki is a animated sushi character, was originally created in Spring 2008 for a animation class. In Fall 2008, Professor Dana Lamb wanted me to use this idea to enter his class for Spring 2009. In Winter 2009, the idea/story was one of the three animation choose by school faculties . In Spring 2009, the animation is in production.

The story is about a sushi-Buki, who has a addiction of soy sauce. He wakes up one night in the refrigerator on the sushi bar, and he spot a soy sauce in the other end of the kitchen on a cabinet. He is going to try to shoot himself up to the cabinet using the tools which he could find in the kitchen.

We hope the animation will be fully finished around June 2009.