National Portfolio Day

Animation / Marketing

Target Users

High School Students

Role

Animator

Team

RIT Marketing Team

Impressions

48,078

Reach

14,271

Software

Cinema 4D, Illustrator

View this post on Instagram

It’s almost here — #RIT’s @nationalportfolioday event is this Sunday, Nov. 3! It’s a great opportunity for students preparing portfolios for college admission to receive feedback from our esteemed faculty and reps from other top art and design colleges. They can also take tours of our facilities and attend an admissions and financial aid presentation. Visit rit.edu/artdesign/npd to learn more and pre-register. #RITartdesign #NationalPortfolioDay #portfolioprep #portfolios . Animation by @rit_nmd student @davidfanto

A post shared by RIT College of Art and Design (@rit_artdesign) on Oct 29, 2019 at 7:14am PDT

Project Overview

In 2019, Rochester Institute of Technology again was to host the National Portfolio Day, where students across the country would have their portfolio reviewed by different schools. The marketing team wanted to get the word out in an advertisement geared to their high-school audience, while incorporating the origami theme.

Process

Discussion

The marketing team was fine with either a 2D or 3D advertisement. I found it helpful to ask questions when my understanding wasn't clear.

Game-plan

I started by looking for origami instruction books and researching how to make animating origami in Cinema 4D, the software I deliberated to be the easiest for the job.

Getting Started

After researching and fiddling around, I found the best way was to use the real origami and deconstruct it.

Book of Choice

Nicolas Terry's Drawing Origami was the most helpful because the origami represented the print media.

Laying Out the Folds

After laying out the origami flat, I was able to go over the lines in Illustrator.

Point Level Animation

The hardest part was getting the point level animation to look believable.

Rigging

Once I folded the origami to a tiger shape, I could rig it and animate it from there.

Weighting

But first, I had to get the weights of the joints right. The fact that I could rig it as a unit surprised me.

Stripes and All

Adding stripes really distinguished the origami from a dog. I also worked on really getting the head shape right.

Camera Angles

Camera morphs really allowed for some fun movement. Took a while to understand the best method for the flow.

Takeways

This project was really fun, yet there were some hiccups along the way. Nevertheless, I learned a lot from the process. If I were to do it again, I would do more tests, and have interstitial artifacts. I am curious to see the improvement to the walk cycle if I were to rig a copy of the tiger with more subdivisions after the folding animation.