Bringing Krampus to Life With Maxon One How Something’s Awry transformed a holiday tale into a stunning animation for Maxon’s December 2024 release.
To celebrate the holidays and showcase the new features and updates to Maxon One in December, Maxon commissioned Something’s Awry Productions to create a short animation that fits the festive season. The piece makes use of many of the tools inside of Maxon One and the latest updates to ZBrush for iPad, Cinema 4D’s new Booleans, Redshift’s new Toon shader, and Red Giant Particular to take viewers into Krampus’ wintery lair.
We talked with Something’s Awry Lead Animator Kris Theorin and 3D Concept Artist Gabriel Soares about the short and how they used the new and updated features to bring the piece to life.
Tell us a bit about your process. How did you approach the concept and design for this animation?
Theorin: The concept for this film was developed with two goals in mind: to celebrate the holidays with a self-contained 30-second short film and to incorporate Redshift's new NPR shader into its visual style. With those objectives, we came up with a story that could best be told through the use of stylized, illustrative visuals. A 'fairy tale storybook aesthetic' with Krampus as the protagonist fit the concept perfectly. After some experimentation, we settled on a sketchy pencil look for the environment and characters. This approach added a fun quality to the film and softened the edges of what initially seemed like a dark story — until the big reveal.
How was ZBrush for iPad used to design Krampus?
Theorin: As with all our productions, using ZBrush for character sculpting was an invaluable part of our process. Once we got the amazing Krampus design from our character designer Matt Haber, we handed it off to Gabriel Soares, who brought it to life using ZBrush for iPad. I'll let him take it from here!
Soares: As I am originally a 2D artist, my way of sculpting is simple and straightforward. My creative process consists of assembling figures using simple shapes such as spheres, cubes and cylinders.
Surprisingly, the tools I used in ZBrush for iPad in this project were mostly the same ones I already use in ZBrush for Desktop: basic tools such as ZRemesher, Subdivision Levels, Masks, Inflate, Move, Remesh by Union.
The transition from desktop to iPad was intuitive and smooth because the interface is improved and simplified. All the main tools are available in an ergonomic way, which enhances the fluidity of the work.
One feature I like about ZBrush is that you don’t need to be an expert in the software (which offers infinite possibilities and resources) because you can create incredible things using basic resources. This makes ZBrush for iPad an inclusive work tool for artists from other fields who are interested in expanding their skills through 3D.
Please describe the experience you had with the new Boolean system in Cinema 4D.
Theorin: For us, booleans are always a tool used late in production when we need to make big changes to an object without spending time remodeling, texturing, and so on. Now that Cinema 4D features a new Boolean system, the process has become even simpler.
For this short, we used booleans for the big 'crunch' moment at the end. When you need the head of a gingerbread man to be chomped off in a pinch, there's no better tool than a quick boolean. What is great about the new system is that, instead of having to take multiple cylinders and mesh them together to avoid the issues you can get with multiple objects in a boolean, we could just drop those same cylinders into the new system and get a perfect 'bite' subtraction from the gingerbread man. This allowed for much quicker iterations on the look of the bite without having to bake everything down.
What techniques did you use in Redshift to achieve a toon-shaded look?
Theorin: The entire short was conceived with toon shading in mind, which presented an exciting challenge. In the past, our short films have always leaned toward the 'Pixar look,' and we have always avoided using NPR (Non-Photorealistic Rendering) shaders. We’ve found that NPR shaders can quickly take on a very 'computery' look, stripping some of the artistry from the shot. However, after experimenting with Redshift's new Toon shader, we were pleased to see how much granular control it offered over the shader's appearance. From shadows to line quality and even coloring the contours based on the lighting — a feature especially helpful for this film — we were able to achieve the exact sketchy, painterly look we were going for.
Knowing that the film would be entirely toon shaded, this decision affected all aspects of production, from the designs to the textures and even how we animated the character. We ensured the character was designed to be highly stylized, appearing as though he had jumped out of a Disney cartoon. From there, we used Substance 3D Painter extensively to give both Krampus and the lair a sketchy pencil quality. This step was crucial to help the Toon shader blend seamlessly with the 3D characters. Finally, we animated the character at 12 frames per second throughout most of the short and rendered everything without motion blur to give it a more 2D, graphic feel.
Please describe your workflow between the different Maxon programs and how you optimized the scenes for rendering.
Theorin: As always, jumping between ZBrush, Cinema 4D, Redshift, and even Red Giant plugins in After Effects was smooth. We had no issues modeling our character in ZBrush, exporting it with texture maps to Cinema 4D, rigging it, shading it in Redshift, and tying everything together using Colorista and Optical Glow in After Effects. The workflow between programs was consistent and reliable.
What was great about the Toon shader for this production is that we’ve never had a 30-second short film render faster. Even without optimization, we found the Toon shader to be lightweight when it came to the final renders. What would normally take at least three or four days with our traditional 'Pixar look' took less than a day using NPR. In the end, this allowed for a significant number of iterations and re-rendering late in production. We didn’t feel the need to settle for 'good enough' and instead could go back, tweak something, and have it rendered within an hour or two. This resulted in a film that looked exactly how I imagined it, with no compromises.
Talk about the final stages of production and post-production.
After all the shots were rendered out, compositing in After Effects was the final crucial step to tie everything together. As always, we used Colorista extensively to tweak the grading, add vignettes, and enhance the clarity of different elements. Optical Glow — and an occasional Real Lens Flare — was added to create a softer, warmer aesthetic to certain shots. This approach smoothed out the edges of our toon-shaded animation and gave it a more diffused look, since we wanted Krampus' lair to appear a bit frightening, yet still retain warmth, which the optical glow helped provide. Finally, no animation would be complete without a touch of Particular to enhance an element or two. The sparks in the fire and the red magic dust that Krampus sprinkles onto the cookies were created using Particular, as it offered more control and flexibility than baking those effects right into the animation.