Orphan's Piano | Caleb Worcester

At Eat Rice Studios, I served as technical director and 3D environment artist, developing a new pipeline for 2D characters to cast shadows and interact with 3D environments. My work covered environment builds, lighting, and the short's overall visual direction.

When making the Orphan's Piano, we wanted the animation to feel very integrated into our gorgeous 3D environments. This being something I had thought about at length for years before this, I had an idea. What if we had the 2d planes actually sit in a raycasted - globally illuminated environment, and stack the lighting layers on top of the main base color?

This work flow has some limitations, but the really amazing thing is it works as a really fantastic compositing step, with amazingly natural lighting interactions. We didn't plan this, but look at the character shadow on the moving drape!