Jacky Winter Artists with Flutter

Here at Flutter, we love a good yarn. No, not the stuff your grandma uses to knit beanies for her chihuahua. We love a good story. And at the heart of a good story is usually a great character. And if there’s something our artists know how to do, it’s create incredible characters. And tie balloon animals with their feet – but that’s another yarn, for another time.

Another thing we love? Transforming our artists’ work. Taking their concepts and pairing them with the skills of our animation team to transport them to an entirely new world. This project was an exercise in just that – seeing where we could take various 2D character styles by translating them into 3D and motion. It was a melding of minds and talents that tested our creative brains and brought to life such characters as Burger Boy and Cat God. What’s a world without them? Not worth living in, we tell you what.

We started by recruiting a range of Jacky Winter artists – Crispe, Brolga, James Boorman, Mike Jacobsen and
Rilla Alexander – to develop original characters. From there, we closely modeled the shape and design of each, making sure to maintain the aesthetic of the original from all angles. After that, we dove into creating custom textures and materials, thinking carefully about how these would work to give each character it’s own individual sense of physicality. For example, we took the flat orange of Burger Boy’s shirt and gave it a cotton material, with a subtle fuzzy fluff to match. We speckled his skin with freckles and fleshy tones, and gave his pants a proper denim feel. We topped each of the characters off with a range of detailing, like surfaces, reflections, supporting objects, and wrinkles in clothing. Once the textures were done, it was time to get them in their best lighting — so into a 3D scene they went, essentially a digital photo studio lighting setup where we could showcase and render our character stills. But why stop there? Sure, the stills look great, but we’re an animation studio after all, so next step was to get our little buddies all rigged up, so we could manipulate them into different poses for animation.

At the end of it all, we’ve got ourselves a series of transformed characters, with turntables showing their full models and walk cycles where you can see each come to life. And we’re just getting started – keep your eyes peeled for snazzy transformations to come.