Created in collaboration with a Pixel Blast Studio, this Crayola project involved extending and refining existing Maya character rigs, materials, and poses to bring over 50 unique color personalities to life.
3D Modeling, 3D Materials, Texturing, Rendering, Image Generation
This is a small preview of recent work created for Crayola in collaboration with Pixel Blast Studio, their creative partner in New York City. The project involved updating and extending an existing Autodesk Maya character rig, along with developing custom materials, look development, and posing for more than 50 unique character expressions and compositions.
Although the original workflow was adapted into 3ds Max and V-Ray, the project ultimately evolved into a hybrid pipeline that reintroduced Maya and V-Ray for Maya specifically for this production. Maya’s rigging flexibility and deformation tools proved better suited for extending and refining an existing animation rig without compromising its integrity.
The character rig itself was an impressive feat of technical animation engineering, built around deep node networks that managed FK/IK switching, surface collision prevention, procedural controls, and a wide range of automation systems. Hundreds of interconnected rigging solutions worked together behind the scenes, allowing entire character variations to be swapped and updated through a simple dropdown selection while maintaining consistency across the production pipeline.
Each new color introduction featured its own distinct personality, requiring subtle adjustments in posing, materials, and presentation to give every character a unique identity while remaining true to the Crayola brand. The work balanced technical precision with expressive character design, making the process both creatively rewarding and technically challenging.
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The work was for several new color introductions, each color has its own character and print materials associated with it. The work has been challenging and fun to figure out with all the subtlety required to differentiate their personalities. 3D Max, Maya and VRay for both were used.
Being able to add to an existing rig without degradation is something that 3D Max just isn’t as good at. Hopefully I’ll be able to continue to share a bit more in the future on this as new work progresses.
These are rendered extremely large, so you can zoom in enough to even see the fuzz on the paper and cracks and distortions in the wax.
We even create a bunch of poses for different holidays and events that required special accessorcies and clothing!
As 3D character work can be costly if not tightly controlled, most of the rendered required quite a bit of photoshop and retouching to stay within tight budgets, the folks at Pixel Blast Studio took care of that and perfected it to Crayola standards.
Drag to see some of the layers output for color selection.
Delivering layered renders was very important to the client so they had full control for consistency and color precision.
