Behind-the-Scenes: The SATMA 2022 Character Build
The Pyro Media team has been a part of the SATMA awards for a few years now, and we’re always excited to take on the new challenges presented to us each year. From script writing, voiceovers, to social media and, our speciality, creating mind blowing visuals and graphics to make this prestigious event sparkle even more! With the 2023 SATMA awards just around the corner, we thought we’d take you for an exclusive, behind the scenes look at what we got up to last year.
For the 17th SATMA awards, held in Mpumalanga, we designed a 3D character from scratch, to bring a human element into the theme of “My culture, Your culture, One nation”. And we think we did a pretty good job!
3D Character Concept
We wanted to model our 3D character incorporating visual elements from a variety of Africa’s rich cultures, including Zulu, Ndebele, Sotho and Xhosa. This included everything from clothing, jewellery and adornments, and body markings. So we turned to the internet to check out some reference images, taking different elements from different cultures and using all of them to create our basic character concept in Adobe Photoshop.
Bringing our 3D Character to Life
Time to model our SATMA character and bring her to life. To do this, we used Blender. Blender is a powerful and free-to-use software for creating 3D graphics, animations, and visual effects. It works like a digital canvas where you can build and manipulate objects in a virtual 3D space. Using various tools and controls, you can shape objects, apply textures, set up lighting, and rig models and objects.
Blender uses a combination of user inputs and algorithms to turn creative ideas into stunning visual content, making it a versatile tool for artists, designers, and animators to bring their imaginations to life in the digital realm. We added colouring, clothing, jewellery and body markings to our character, bringing us closer to the final look!
Strike a Pose!
Now that we had a 3D character to work with, we started experimenting with body positions and poses, finally deciding on the perfect one to showcase our end vision.
Texturing
We use a program called Substance Painter, where we take on the task of texturing our character, her clothing, and all of the other elements we added that were inspired by different African cultures.
The 17th SATMA Awards Character
This is the final look of our 2022 SATMA Awards 3D character.
We put in some final touches, including camera angles, lighting, 3D shapes and some final positioning tweaks, and got to work on our final task; incorporating her into the title sequence composition.
And here we have it! The title sequence composition for the 2022 SATMA awards. We incorporated the 3D animated logo we created with the character and finished it off with some touches of gold, which is a colour closely tied into the SATMA theme.
Check out the full behind the scenes video here.
Don’t forget to watch the 2023 SATMA awards, which will be held in Pyro Media’s hometown-Durban, KZN!
