27 Mar 2013

Week 61 – Rain and Mist Effects
by | posted in: Compositing, Effets | 0

Hey everyone!

We’re back with a little tutorial, this time showing the technique we use to generate our rain and mist effects. We were asked if our effects were done in 2D or in 3D, well the answer is : a little bit of both! Even if the mist is rendered directly in our 3D scene, it’s actually being created along a grid without thickness, of which we render a foreground and a background version. It’s then in compositing that we premultiply it with our luminance depth pass to achieve the illusion of depth.

Yeah, we know, it’s probably a tad too technical for those of you who don’t do any 3D, but hey, we’ll make up for it another week!

By the way, all our effects are created using a plug-in for Softimage that’s called Exocortex Slipstream (http://exocortex.com/products/slipstream). The results are really nice and we always save a lot of time. If you haven’t already done so, go check out their demo, it’s worth it!

And now, here’s a video showing you all the steps of our technique :

So that’s it, we hope this was instructive. See you next time for more news about Le Gouffre!

13 Mar 2013

Week 59 – Compositing Breakdown
by | posted in: Compositing | 7

Hello everyone!

This week, we prepared a little breakdown of the passes we use in compositing. It’s also a new shot we never showed before!

And for the curious out there, here’s a montage showing you all the different kind of passes used in the video.

As you can see, we’ve got a lot of things to prepare before rendering. Luckily, we wrote a script that simplify our life by setting up most of these passes in the matter of a single click. Of course there’s still work to be done like placing all the lights and effects like rain, fire and mist, but that’s still much faster than doing everything from scratch all the time.

Well, that’s it, we hope you liked this post! Come back soon for more news on Le Gouffre™!