Noah Heilveil
Game Designer | Environment Artist
Heartstrings Short Film
Heartstrings, directed by Erin Donahue, is a 3D animated short film created at the Savannah College of Art and Design that centers around the story of an Irish immigrant named Ailidh, who immigrated to in New York City, and her father. I had the pleasure of collaborating with a wonderfully talented team of eleven artists. I was responsible for technical training and implementation of look development; primarily on researching and designing a paint stroke effect for our 3d characters, as well as heading the character effects (cloth and hair) simulations and overseeing the use and creation of light rigs to maintain visual consistency across scenes. Since we were such a small team, we all wore many hats and I have worked on the rigging for the film, the simulations for both main characters, layout, lighting, compositing, and more. Stay tuned for updates as we complete our film festival circuit, check out the recognitions we've received so far below!!
Tools and Tech Training Examples
Heartstrings Scale Grid
Originally based on the Maya to UE4 grid this code base served to allow me to edit, tweak, problem solve and add features as desired to help keep a consistent scale that could be checked throughout the production process of the film
At Request Tutorials
Throughout the production I made numerous tutorials on tools that I created or edited for use in our day to day work. Additionally we had a discord channel were people could ask me questions they had regarding anything Maya or pipeline related. Sometimes I could answer in just the chat with a message if there was some error that needed a preference or render setting changed, but on other occasions I had the opportunity to make video tutorials for the team to reference.
Heartstrings - Paint Stroke Shader
edges as well as multiply additional variation through the already hand painted materials to create literal, additional depth.
Below you can find tutorial instructing how you can do the look on your own work!
One of the most important aspects to for the film was our desire to try and create a painterly appearance in 3d cg. We went through several methods and tried different iterations, but eventually settled on having an in camera paint stroke effect that could update and animate itself to break up outlines and harsh 3d