Choco Nutjob
A self-initiated 3D loop arranged entirely around one material problem: making chocolate look like chocolate and not like wet brown plastic.
The brief
Choco Nutjob is a self-initiated 3D piece. The title came before the animation, which is not how anyone recommends working, and which turned out to be the most useful constraint in the project.
What I made
A short loop built around a single material problem: chocolate. Chocolate is miserable to render convincingly, because everything that makes it read as chocolate is happening just under the surface. Get the subsurface scattering wrong and you have brown plastic. Get the specular wrong and you have wet brown plastic.
So the whole piece is arranged to show the material off rather than to tell a story. The camera stays close, the light is one hard key with a soft bounce, and the motion is slow enough that the highlight has time to travel across the form. Faster motion would have hidden the exact thing worth looking at.
It loops seamlessly, which was a decision about where it lives. A loop is what motion needs in order to survive on a feed, where nobody arrives at the beginning.