Mounish (Matthew) Mohan
Animator
3D Generalist specializing in 3D modelling, texturing, lighting, fur and hair grooming and teaching aspiring digital artists.
3D Generalist specializing in 3D modelling, texturing, lighting, fur and hair grooming and teaching aspiring digital artists.
I’m Matthew and I’ve been in the multimedia industry for roughly 11 years. I started my career as a 3D visualizer working for my dad helping him with designing exhibition stalls for events around the country. But I was never fully satisfied as I felt I could do more than visualise geometric structures. I found my calling in animation and decided to pursue my education in it. I specialised in 3D modelling and Texturing and later became a 3D generalist as it helped me showcase my 3D models better along with the story telling component attached to it.
Being a 3D artist my preferred aniamtion style is and has always been 3D. I have learned traditional 2D animation and I have worked in personal 2D projects in the past. But it has not been my go-to animation style.
How to Train your dragon and Ice Age are a couple of movies of a long list that I draw my inspiration from.
Definitely humor! I believe that animations have the biggest potential to make people detach from reality and enjoy a good laugh. I try my best to achieve this through the animations I make.
I use a wide array of software to get the final outpul.
The first step on my creative process is to sketch out some basic shapes and collect as many reference as possible. I then come up with a rough storyboard (when I say rough, I mean really rough) and follow up with my modelling, texturing, rigging and lighting the scene. I then animate the shots and render them. I finally take the rendered images to after effects and add VFX and composite them to make it more convincing.
Character Modelling and texturing are my favorite part of the process as it’s something I love doing and it gives you sense of creating something from nothing.
Do not be overwhelmed if you aren’t good at animation. Animation is not a talent, it’s a skill. Skills are like muscles, the more you do, the stronger it gets. The animation industry is constantly evolving, and new things come up every often where you feel you cannot do it. The biggest step you can take is to try and learn new skills and keep up with the current trends.
I usually just play the guitar or play video games or go for a drive.
The fact that it had dinosaurs was good enough for me to enjoy it! But the entire project was amazing. Excellent story and amazing people to work with. The challenging part for me in the project was when I got sick close to crunch time and had a hard time trying to get back on track with my timeline. But like I said, amazing and understanding people to work with. So, it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.
I think I answered a part of this in the previous question. Just the mention of Dinosaurs was enough. But adding superhero and time travel was like icing on top! Regardless, Storiaverse’s idea of bringing writers and animators to work together and create masterpieces is an amazing initiative. This is one of the main reasons I wanted to collaborate.
Through animation, we have the opportunity to break down barriers, challenge stereotypes, and contribute to a more inclusive and empathetic world. With the characters and narratives, we can reflect the world’s richness by not just visual representation but by telling stories that resonate with various backgrounds.
The biggest contributing factor is the wow factor. The things you can do through a digital lens that you cannot do in real life. To create something that can tell a story in a way that you can only imagine in real life, that’s what makes me love the most about the animation space and what draws me to it.
I think AI is the future of animation, used as a tool in every aspect of the pipeline. With a great tool with cutting edge technologies, animators can create great animations with ease. This is where I think Animation industry is heading towards.