Little Ghost Kid from HELL

Happy Halloween! 🚏👻 🎃

Little Ghost Kid from hell returning home after trick or treating in the human realm~

Photogrammetry assets in the background from Megascan and Polycam. Bus stop signs were created with Adobe Illustrator, shading with MaterialX, and rendered with Karma XPU.

This project was created for the SideFX internal Halloween image and animation contest, and I am very happy that I won first place! I love how the looping animation turns out.

Originally, I was trying to make a spooky ghost sitting on a bench at a cemetery like the flipbook below. However, the idea of microphotography came to my mind as I was browsing through the Megascan asset library trying to find assets to put in the background. That’s how I ended up using a photo scan of the tree from Polycam, and other assets from Megascan.

The most challenging part of the project was making the animation loop since I had different moving elements including the cloth, boots, particles from the pumpkin, and the dust floating in the air.

The method I ended up using was using simulating extra frames. For example, I simulated 10 extra frames for the cloth, and I blended the first 10 frames of the animation with those 10 extra frames to make it loop. For the particles, I simulated extra frames before and after and combined them together with the animation frames. Therefore, the dying particles will continue flying in the air as they loop back at the beginning, and the same concept is used for the particles just born.