- For: IAA | Institute Astrophysics of Andalusia
- Area: Motion, 3D, fashion, 3D print
- Tools: Cinema 4D, Marvelous, After Effects, Photoshop, Stable Diffusion
- Year: 2023
This project takes inspiration from the awesome novel «Aelita» where our heroine reveals her planet Mars is facing a huge environmental disaster. Just like in the book, Aelita needs help! She’s sent this box filled with experiments, hoping to find young scientists (our European high school students) who can come up with solutions to save Mars.
I was able to contribute the transmission at the beginning and end, where we can see Aelita in a 3D hologram with a pyramidal projection on a device.
Project from Colectivo Verbena
Character and fashion design made by Awmanda
Wow! Sooo Coool project with R&D, experimentation, 3D, and animation… Where do I sign up? These are some steps we went through to reach the final animation (you know, a smooth motion if it’s also smooth organized).
Perfecto! With the approval of the model and shader, I can now work on the bones and incorporate the character’s personality into their movements and expressions (with Cinema’s «Pose Morph», it was going to be easy-peasy). Aelita was a teenage queen with a lot of attitude and flowww!
At this point, we entered the final stretch. We had approval for each part of the character, we only needed to animate and synchronize it with the audio + a little bit of magic in postproduction to feel like part of the movie…
C’est fini!
Oh, that’s not all…
It turned out sooo great! But… Aelita had so much potential and we couldn’t appreciate her to perfection in those transmissions, so I landed on Mars to do a fashion photoshoot, and this time she gave it all to the camera.
Aelita’s story ends with a Martian photoshoot! She’s got the looks and the flowww! We’re taking Aelita out of the hologram and onto the Martian landscape… Expect stunning visuals, awwwesome flowww, and a whole lot of Martian charm.
Every great photoshoot starts with some ideas. Swipe to see some of the initial sketches, after it, I’ve worked with Stable Diffusion to provide some ideas and textures for Aelita’s photoshoot (AI technology that wasn’t yet trendy in the summer of 2022).
Swipe to see the AI-powered inspiration! We’ve got otherworldly landscapes, futuristic vibes, and even some funky fashion ideas, which add fine details to our previously made moodboard.
These AI-generated tileable textures are ready to be applied to Aelita’s Martian environment. I’ve made this sand tiled textures with Stable Diffusion. A few more tweaks in PSD and putting them inside C4D and this is almost there!
Very cool project Carlos, but… We want to see something physical. What did the students find? Can we see your Aelita in physical form?
Colectivo Verbena designed the entire structure of the game, visual identity, the website, a complete packaging, different experiments, a card game, and dynamics with instructions that the students came across as they completed the activity. You can find the full project information on the official Eurpean website of Mars in a box.
It all starts with a box sent from Mars, in which they scan a QR code that leads them to my first animation and instructions from Aelita. After opening the box, they find all the experiments as we can see below. The following photos were made by Colectivo Verbena.
