How I created Primavera with Maya, by Felipe Fierro

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It fills my soul to be able to convey so many emotions with my characters. I'd been so busy with my company projects that I hadn't done any of my own work in a long time, so I finally decided to make the time.

What started as a rigging practice quickly evolved into a more ambitious project, I end up doing character design, modeling, grooming, texturing, animation, rig, rendering and comp —basically, the entire pipeline haha.

I'm thrilled to see what I can accomplish now at 31 compared to when I started animating at 13. I hope to continue creating for you, but above all, for myself.

It all started with a sketch. Since it was a mainly a rigging project, I wanted to add some challenges, such as the eyes. I didn't want the usual spherical eyes, but rather the complexity of rigging the rotation of oval eyes, and from then on, the shapes were created organically.

For the modeling I wanted to have the challenge of sculpting it 100% within Maya, the new remesh or boolean tools worked wonderfully for what I needed, I was able to sculpt the character quickly.

Now for the Grooming I used the Xgen Interactive Groom Editor and it worked like a charm, I could sculpt the fur exactly as I intended, for the rendering I used Arnold because I wanted to have that "Movie - high quality" feel.

Rigging was my focus on this incredible project. By this point, I was already in love with the character and wanted to give him the best I could.

I used the new multi-skinning system to create all kinds of controls and give him the greatest possible flexibility.

For the animation I used the sketches as a reference, trying to make the poses as faithful as possible, I think the result that the rig allowed me to achieve was incredible.

And we come to the final part, the composition! Arnold's render passes played a huge role here, allowing me to play with the depth of field, motion blur, and color adjustments in the final stage.

And that's it folks! haha this is the result of a week of work for the one-man band, haha. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did making it.