Inspired by the memory of my first race, it was a cold rainy morning before the crack of dawn on the banks of Puget Sound.

JACK

The protagonist of Cox is Jack, a scrawny Asian-American teenager living in Seattle, Washington. Despite having little physical strength and below-average grades, Jack is extraordinarily competitive in his will to survive and does so by any means necessary, taking on the role of the Trickster. In a modern context echoing the myths of Coyote, Loki, and Brer Rabbit, Jack’s story is a cautionary tale about the value that our society places on winning.

I chose to sculpt Jack in Zbrush, minimized brushing and emphasized using separate subtools and modifiers to create precise curves and tapers while also separating all of the objects that would have separate materials. The face is textured with a combination of hand painted textures, procedural subsurface scattering, and utilizes a hand painted normal map to add a more painted feeling to interactive lighting. The folds of his jacket are procedurally displaced to allow for a more realistic feel while still staying relatively low poly.

EFFECTS

When I was Jack’s age, I was fascinated by long exposure photography, street art, and science fiction. The light trails were simple bezier curves with emissive gradients that corresponded to a black and white alpha value for their transparency. Everything is just parented to a rotating object and the wheels of the trailer aren’t even rotating.

The anamorphic effects were achieved differently in both shots. In the closeup of Jack, the bokeh were made by using depth of field in the virtual camera and stretching the aspect ratio, as well as adding barrel distortion and glow in compositing. The wide was rendered without depth of field and uses stretched emissive objects to mimic the elongated bokeh. The rain effects are alpha planes with moving noise textures that are emissive in the wide shot and translucent in the close up. The puddles on the ground are the same effect without transparency.

I painted the graffiti in photoshop to achieve a higher resolution texture I could apply on the bridge. I threw in a few story easter eggs as well as Chinese and Japanese characters.