The VR short film 'Ajax All Powerful', created with Cinema 4D and Maxon's ZBrush

Cinema 4D and ZBrush tools Maxon were key to the development of the VR animated short 'Ajax All Powerful', written and directed by Ethan Shaftel and co-produced by easyAction, VeeR and Detona Cultura.

Ajax All Powerfull, launched on August 20 via Meta Store, is an animated comedy that follows the genie Ajax, who, in a dark twist, collects souls in exchange for granting wishes... until he meets his match when a girl, who rubs his lamp, comes prepared with her own lawyer to help him negotiate. The animated short film with virtual reality removes the fourth wall to provide viewers with a uniquely immersive perspective in which to experience events.

ZBrush, a tool for digital sculpting and painting, was mainly used for character design, while all animation was created in Cinema 4D, the professional 3D modeling, animation, simulation and rendering software Maxon. As Shaftel himself explains, using Cinema 4D it was easy to plan and block action sequences during the writing and animation process, as well as review and edit when necessary.

In addition to producing the animations preview, the VR 360 video tools in Cinema 4D allowed Shaftel to render frames of 360 video from different perspectives, which were then brought to Adobe Premiere to be edited in a VR storyboard: “The good thing about using Cinema 4D in VR production is that it can be used in several different ways and with Maxon it is such a simple process to export files to VR,” says the director.

To Shaftel, this is just the beginning of using virtual reality in narrative techniques: "This has been the first time that I have been able to bring together all the components of my vision of how I think narrative VR can work. I hope that some of the techniques I am playing with can transcend a single project and be applied to other VR narratives and become part of the grammar of VR storytelling. That is our current goal."

https://youtu.be/pmttkHdQwBA