Week 73 – Face drops technique

posted in: Uncategorized | 11

Hey everyone!

This week, we’ll be showing you a technique we use to render small drops of water that run down the face of our characters. You’ll see it’s quite simple, and also has the benefit of being far less complicated than to try to simulate the whole thing.

First, we create an animated texture of the droplets. In order to do this, we use After Effects and a texture of the character’s face as reference. This way, it’s a lot easier to animate the drops so that they really follow the contours of the face.

Once the animation is completed, we export an image sequence with only the drops in black and white so that we can later apply it on the 3d model.

For example, here’s one close-up shot that needed this effect :

We create a new pass with a constant material that uses the image sequence that we rendered previously. This way, the texture will follow the model perfectly, no matter how much the face deforms.

That’s it! Now, we only need to render the pass to use it in our compositing package. A good general tip to really sell the effect is to make the drops be more visible in the reflective areas of the face. Here’s the final image :

Have a good week everyone!

Week 71 – Cloud projections

posted in: Textures | 2

Before introducing this week’s video, we’d like to share with you some very good news! Indeed, we’ve been selected for the first ever IP Incubator Spotlight on CGSociety. Basically, it’s a group where people are encouraged to post every two weeks the progress they’ve made on their personal IP’s so they can stay motivated and get some feedback from the community. Every months, the moderator chooses one project to be in the spotlight, and this time, it’s Le Gouffre!

If you want to have a look yourself, here’s the link:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=2&t=1110087

Now, for this weeks’ video… we thought you’d like to see the technique we used to add movement to our painted clouds, like in our autumn sequence. We don’t explain everything in detail, but it should give you a good enough idea of how it’s done so you can adapt it with whatever program you use.

There you go, we hope you enjoyed this week’s post. Come back soon for more news about Le Gouffre™!