The Plush Life is a new short film by Timothy Heath, the resident animator/artist on the Gelato team at NVIDIA. The 3-minute short is the first in a series of animated films from the Gelato team. Follow the adventures of Lundo and Flint as they go about their plush lives. Long-time coworkers and buddies, Flint and Lundo deal with what life brings them as cogs in a corporate machine. This first short follows the pair on the way to work one Monday morning where Lundo, who has had a button added to his nose over the weekend (the plush equivalent of a nose piercing), loses the new button and some of his stuffing after a big sneeze.
The Plush Life was rendered with Gelato Pro 2.2 using Autodesk Maya and Shave and a Haircut to produce Flint's and Lundo's plush surfaces.
Rendering features used in the course of the short include:
Gelato's high-quality motion blur
Accurate surface displacement
Depth of field
Ambient occlusion
Subsurface scattering, and
Raytraced reflections.
Other packages used in the production include Nuke for compositing and Qube! render management software.
About the artist:
Timothy Heath has worked as an animator in the film and entertainment industry for the last twelve years. Most recently at Industrial Light and Magic, he worked on "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest". Timothy spent four years of his career at Square Pictures in Honolulu, Hawaii as a lead animator and he has also worked at Electronic Arts as an Animation Supervisor. Earlier in his career, he lived in New York City and worked in post production houses on film, commercial, and location based entertainment rides as well as broadcast animations for ABC.
The Plush Life
Rendering features used in the course of the short include: