Description
A Gift for São Paulo: Hope is an animation project made as a gift of hope for São Paulo. In a deserted future version of the city, a small gardening robot, I.R.I.S (Iris), discovers the last known seed. She prepares a greenhouse to nurture it, but when the remaining energy cannot sustain them both, she gives up her own power core to keep the seed alive. At dawn, a sprout emerges.
Recognizable landmarks, including the Ponte Estaiada and the Banespa Building, connect this imagined world to the city people know. The project explores environmental destruction, care and renewal through visual storytelling, and Iris's expressive eyes, rounded forms and botanical design build an emotional connection with a machine whose purpose is to protect life.
The team wrote the story and screenplay and created the storyboard and character designs, then used GPT-generated reference images to guide character and asset generation in Tripo. ZBrush handled retopology, UV mapping and texture baking. Rigging began in Mixamo and continued in Maya with HumanIK, additional joints and skin-weight corrections; animation combined selected Mixamo clips with hand-set keyframes, assembled and refined in Maya's Time Editor. Marble by World Labs turned environment references into virtual 3D spaces for camera planning and video export, and camera tracking in After Effects tied these backgrounds to the Maya scenes. Separate render layers, EXR passes and Shadow Matte made the compositing possible, together with Photoshop masks, matte painting and final color adjustments. The work so far includes character and environment studies, 3D assets, an animatic, teaser experiments, and animation and VFX tests, laying the visual and technical foundation for Iris's world.
The same character also became a physical object. Starting from the team's original concept art, ChatGPT produced references for pose, appearance and textures; Tripo generated the 3D model, and Smart Mesh provided an editable mesh. The team then edited, corrected and refined the geometry in ZBrush for 3D printing, prepared and sliced the model in Bambu Studio, then painted and finished the print, resulting in a prototype figure that shows Iris's potential as a collectible.
How Tripo was used
Tripo took Iris from concept art into 3D, and both the film and the figure start there.
- Film: guided by GPT-generated reference images, Tripo generated the I.R.I.S character model and the scene assets, speeding the move from visual development to 3D models, which then went on to refinement, animation prep and scene composition.
- Figure: Tripo generated the model from ChatGPT pose and texture references, and Smart Mesh provided an editable mesh that was refined in ZBrush for 3D printing, ending in a printed and painted prototype figure.
