Creating Art Deco-Inspired Animation Of Rich Girl's Soccer Dream With Cinema 4D & Mocap

Introduction

It's a real pleasure to chat with you today. My name is David Sujono, and I'm a Freelance 3D Motion Designer currently based in Sydney, Australia. I've been exploring the world of 3D for around eight years now; what started as a childhood curiosity with Google SketchUp and After Effects eventually led me to learn Cinema 4D, where I began creating short films and passion projects.

It was a blast making my YouTube videos Unknown Waters and Ascension, which were both inspired by the game Subnautica. Another highlight was winning the Rokoko Perfect loop challenge with my render titled Garage Dreams. I then had the amazing opportunity to lead the 3D team at Collider Studio for a few years, where I worked on projects for clients like Specsavers, Defence Force Australia, and Telstra.

I'm now working full-time as a freelancer. What draws me to 3D is the limitless creative potential, it's a medium that allows me to build entire worlds and bring unique narratives to life. My style draws inspiration from 1950s retro-futurism, 1980s synthwave, and the elegance of 1920s Art Deco. When I'm not in front of a screen, I love bodysurfing, jamming on the drums, and spending time in nature, all of which help recharge my creative energy.

References

Chasm's Call is actually the first personal project I have completed since recently making the switch to freelance, so it holds a special place in my heart. My friend sent me the announcement video, and after seeing how cinematic the template was, I knew I wanted to enter this challenge.

I participated in Pwnisher's Infinite Journeys challenge a few years ago but sadly missed the deadline due to rendering issues. I wanted to tackle this newest community challenge using all the skills I had learned in the past few years to create something with an impactful story and engage the viewer with beautiful visuals. And submit it on time! I was playing Atomic Heart at the time and was really inspired by the art design and also USSR architecture. I collected a lot of references, ranging from in-game screenshots, Art Deco artworks, and character designs, and put together a Miro board to keep everything organized.

Composition

I wanted to create a clear visual separation between the rich and the poor, so I had to be very intentional with the composition to communicate that contrast effectively. In my earlier sketches, I initially placed the rich girl down in the chasm, but it quickly became clear that it didn't work visually.

Wealth is typically associated with elevation, open space, and light, while poverty is often depicted as being lower, more confined, or shadowed. That realization led me to rethink the overall layout. Once I landed on a sketch that felt more grounded in that visual logic, I began experimenting with a lot of primitive shapes and blockouts to establish a strong compositional base.

This phase was essential for testing scale, spacing, and flow. One of the most impactful changes I made during this process was introducing the cliff and adjusting the curve of the garden path. That subtle shift not only created a natural division in the environment but also helped guide the viewer's eye directly to the girl at the center of the frame, reinforcing her importance in the story.

Modeling

When it came to the assets, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to create the majority of the scene from scratch, something custom-built and tailored specifically to fit the composition. I used Cinema 4D for all of my modeling, making extensive use of Cinema 4D's cloners, deformers, and instancing tools throughout the scene. This allowed me to create a lot of complexity with efficiency. To speed up the texturing workflow, I relied heavily on tri-planar mapping and procedural texturing tools in Redshift. These helped add cavity details, roughness, and bump variations without needing to UV unwrap everything.

One of the biggest challenges was finding the right balance between architectural complexity and maintaining clean visual lines. I didn't want the design to feel overcrowded or distract from the overall composition. To save time, I also focused only on modeling what would be visible to the camera so I didn't waste time on unnecessary details that wouldn't be seen in the final render.

Character

For the main character, I started with a base model from Character Creator 4, which I then imported into Cinema 4D. I wanted to design and model custom clothing that fit the story and overall world. To keep the skirt in place during animation, I used a cloth belt and painted specific cloth weights using vertex maps, giving me more precise control over how the fabric moved. I textured the garments in Substance 3D Painter, incorporating Art Deco patterns and using stencils to maintain clean, detailed designs that reflected the character's refined status. I also wanted to use the same color palette as the surrounding architecture to really seat her into the world. The hair asset was also imported from Character Creator, and I applied cloth physics to the ponytail so it would react naturally to motion. I added a small golden bow tie to her hair, which served as both a visual accent and a storytelling element, adding a touch of innocence while subtly reinforcing the contrast between social classes.

Topology

Due to the tight deadline, I didn't have the luxury of unwrapping every architectural element in detail, so I leaned heavily on tri-planar mapping and procedural texturing techniques to save time without compromising visual quality. These methods allowed me to quickly apply textures across complex surfaces without worrying about seams or stretching, which was crucial for keeping things moving and focusing my energy on elements that were crucial. That said, I gave special attention to the foreground elements, particularly the mat, where I knew the textures would be more closely scrutinized. I modeled the mat with clean topology and purposeful UV flow, allowing the patterns to follow its elegant curve naturally. This helped maintain a sense of craftsmanship and polish in the areas closest to the viewer.

Texturing

When I approached texturing the scene, I knew I had to focus the details on the areas that were most important to the viewer. For the left-hand side architecture, I began with a Quixel Megascans tile texture as a base. From there, I layered in procedural Maxon noises to introduce subtle variations in roughness, breaking up the uniformity and adding a more lived-in, tactile feel to the surfaces. I also incorporated Redshift's ambient occlusion and curvature nodes to emphasize edges, cavities, and surface wear, which added extra depth and a slightly aged look to the materials. All of the gold was a highly metallic shader with surface imperfection maps to add subtle bump details and break up the roughness. 

For the background landscape, I created a complex material blend. I combined three to four different texture sets, each with their own displacement maps, to add natural variation in elevation and terrain. To avoid the issue of visible tiling  I layered the materials using procedural noise masks. These masks helped blend the materials organically and ensured that no single texture dominated or repeated in an obvious way, keeping the environment looking believable and cohesive.

Animation

For the animation, I recorded motion capture using my Rokoko SmartSuit Pro II. I needed to tell the story in 5 seconds with my performance, so I recorded a lot of different takes. I then cleaned up the mocap data in iClone 8 to refine the performance and ended up changing the original animation quite a lot. I made sure the arms were locked to the railing using a reach target; I removed a head turn using motion layers and added an additional lean over the balcony to give the girl a sense of curiosity and interest. After that, I transferred the animation to my clothed character using a retargeting control rig, allowing me to iterate the animations in iClone and apply them to my character with ease.

The background characters playing soccer are all individual motion capture recordings blended together to create a cohesive animation. It was fun asking my mate who plays soccer how best to choreograph the action. 

Lighting & Rendering

I set up the final scene with the intention of having most of the final look come directly from 3D. This meant carefully adjusting the fog and ensuring the lighting was super dialed in before hitting render. I prefer this approach because it makes the scene feel more integrated into its environment. Plus, it prevents me from getting bogged down in compositing, trying to adjust too many elements that could stray from the original vision. I'm drawn to a clean, polished aesthetic, almost like a miniature set or dollhouse, where everything feels intentional, tactile, and detailed.

My goal was to create something hyper-real, with a sense of grandeur, flair, and opulence. I wanted my work to be visceral and instantly captivate audiences with stunning architecture. I aimed for a clean, cinematic look with a strong render quality and lots of volumetric effects. The grading was kept subtle, just enhancing the contrast slightly and adding a touch of chromatic aberration and glow for some lens effects.

For the lighting, I used one main HDRI alongside a sun and sky rig, with an additional spotlight in the top right corner to accentuate the volumetric fog. I set up a light hitting the foreground to separate it from the background. There were also numerous smaller secondary lights placed strategically to highlight the main character. Invisible gobos were used to create silhouettes on the foreground shelf, adding another layer of depth to the scene.

Challenges

It took me about 200 hours to complete, mostly working in the evenings and on weekends. The main challenges during production were the composition and finalizing of the overall concept. I knew from the start that it was crucial to establish a strong idea and storyline to guide the process. I really enjoyed lighting the scene, as well as modeling and texturing the building. Watching it all come together was incredibly rewarding.

One lesson I've learned throughout this project is the value of seeking feedback from others. It's so helpful to get an outside perspective and catch things you might have missed when you’re so immersed in the work. If I could recommend anything, it would be to dive into lighting tutorials and study composition. Those two foundations were essential for this render and for my art in general and contributed significantly to the final result.

Conclusion

It's such an honor to have made it to the top five, let alone second place! I'm truly grateful to see my work featured on such a large scale and in the montage. It's super rewarding winning a Pwnisher challenge and getting to meet so many amazing artists. This particular work holds a special place in my heart as it's the first personal project I’ve undertaken since recently when I started working full-time as a freelancer.

It's a bit of a full circle moment for me, as I missed the deadline for a previous Pwnisher challenge, and coming 2nd place this time around is such a blessing. The most rewarding part for me was seeing the audience's reactions and comments about how they resonated with the story and the beauty of the visuals. As for upcoming projects, I'm really excited to do something Tron-related, as Tron Legacy is my favorite film of all time – it's what got me into 3D. I used to make a lot of Tron animations when I first started out, and I really want to tackle it now, almost 10 years later. I want to tackle the light cycle transformation scene! Or Disc Wars! So many ideas!

David Sujono, 3D Motion Designer

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford