I think I’ll always be a 2D artist at heart, but there’s no denying the benefits of including 3D in your workflow, and I plan to use it more in both my personal and professional work moving forward.

Created for the Uninterested Unicorns project, this piece is one of my first ventures into the discipline, the Unicorn mech being a combination of 2D, 3D, pixel art frame-by-frame animation and After Effects compositing techniques.

I was able to keep the light sources on separate layers by setting environment light exposure to zero, turning the base model black. This allowed me to export a still to photoshop, set the layer to screen and be left with a nice editable coloured light.

The same method also allowed me to animate a slight flicker in the final video.