Pixel Zoo Presents: The Secrets of Sunflower Valley
Hi everyone! Georgia here from Pixel Zoo Animation Studios, located in sunny Brisbane, Australia. We are super excited to share with everyone our next animated short titled ‘The Secrets of Sunflower Valley’ - A pilot episode for an upcoming series. Created, developed and produced solely by the tremendously talented team of artists here at Pixel Zoo.
‘The Secrets Of Sunflower Valley’ combines cute children’s stop-motion aesthetics from shows such as Postman Pat, Fireman Sam and Noddy, and throws in some monster movie themes, while still keeping a wholesome, heart-warming feel. We imagined this show is for kids who have outgrown postman pat, and now want to see him get maimed.
To watch the episode check it out here: The Secrets of Sunflower Valley Episode 1 - YouTube
With episodes running at a snappy 3 minutes long, the show is a spooky action-comedy series aimed at children 8-10 years old. In each episode, a new monster descends upon the residents of Sunflower Valley. Madness and mayhem ensue - but we’ll soon find that looks can be deceiving, These monsters aren’t all as mean and scary as they first seem. As the dust settles, and a new sun rises, the mysterious Sunflower Stone resets the landscape and brings on the next day’s peril. Adults and children alike will be left wondering ‘What monster’s coming next?!’.
This is our first project release from a new arm of the studio known as ‘Pixel Labs’. Following the partnership with MGA Studios, we’ve now been enabled to develop our own new and existing IP, while still producing the same amazing, top-quality content for our clients.
With a tight budget and a 6-month timeframe, ‘TSOSV’ was the first to reach its final form.
Animated in Maya, and rendered in Unreal Engine 5, we set a goal to flex both our creative and technical skills - with a brief to develop something different from the usual Pixel Zoo style. As wonderful as unicorns, sparkles and rainbows are, we wanted to work on some monsters and explosions!
DEVELOPMENT HIGHLIGHTS
To get a behind-the-scenes look at the process we went through making the series, check out this video here: The Secrets of Sunflower Valley - Production Showcase - YouTube
Maya to Unreal FBX Rigs
At Pixel Zoo, we were already producing a few animated children’s shows that were rendering in Unreal - so we were already quite familiar with the process.
The majority of our studio’s 3D productions use Redshift in Maya, so we were using a rigging system that wasn’t directly supported in Unreal. This required caching out each prop, character and sets animation, for every shot, as alembic sequences, and then importing those into Unreal. It was rather cumbersome, but it worked.
Our new FBX rig pipeline allowed animation data from the rigs in Maya to directly work on the rigs in Unreal.
For the characters’ faces, to get that ‘replacement’ stop motion look, we have an array of eye and mouth shapes. Each shape hides inside the head, at a minute scale (0000.1), and when the desired shape is selected it scales back up to fit in place.
Fire and Smoke
One of the core features of the effects in TSOSV was to keep that handcrafted, stop-motion look and feel. So sprites were the obvious choice for our fire and smoke. The flames in particular drew heavy influence from Fireman Sam.
For the smoke, we initially tried using photos of cotton balls. Collecting an array of different shapes and sizes - but failed to get something that felt right.
We ended up using some painted brushed ‘puffs’ that could be tinted in a variety of colours.
We’re really proud of how well everything came together and hope you enjoy watching it as much as we loved making it. Keep an eye out for more episodes of ‘The Secrets of Sunflower Valley’ to come in the not-too-distant future.
