Octavian - An Eight Legged Story

This is an animation I finished in 2023 as my bachelor's degree final project. I was going for a more stylized low-poly visual with cute characters and an underwater setting. A lot of effort was put into the tentacle animation and facial expressions, to really convey Octavian's rollercoaster of emotions. For the faces, I used an animated texture, created from an image sequence (40 mouths and 40 eyes in Octavian's case), that I controlled using Maya's animation graph.
This was the first time I got to write my own story, create the characters and backgrounds, animate every tentacle and, this year, debut this short-film that I'm very proud of.
Everything was modeled and animated in Maya, textures were painted in Mudbox and the scenes were rendered with Arnold. I compiled all exported frames in Premiere and used After Effects for post-processing.