Week 93 – Bird Animation

posted in: Animation | 0

Hey everyone!

Lately, Carl has animated a couple of birds for some shots of the beginning of the movie. Since we’re always trying to save time when we can, he found an easy way to add variety to a base cycle by using the animation mixer and a simple curve. So here’s a video demonstrating how it was done, as well as a new animation shot showing the birds in action!

Well, that’s it, we hope you enjoyed our little video. Thanks for being here, and come back soon for more news about Le Gouffre!

(By the way, David is animating right now his very last shot on the film!)

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Week 69 – SODEC News

posted in: Animation, Compositing | 0

You might remember those papers we filled a few months ago for the grant? Well, we received the answer last friday and unfortunately, we didn’t get it.

It’s a little sad since we really counted on that money to help us work through the end of this film. It means we’ll have to change our plans a little, but one thing is certain, we’re not giving up! In fact, we’re relieved to finally know what’s going on, these last three months felt like an eternity!

So, for this week’s post, we have another short animation clip to show you. This time, it’s about the villagers taking cover inside the mill before of the storm. Try to imagine it with rain and thunder!

Also, we’re currently reworking some old compositing scenes and it’s just getting better and better! Here’s one we just finished – it’s not necessarily the most dramatic, but at least it doesn’t have any spoilers!

Well, that’s it for this week. Thanks for coming, and see you soon!

Week 67 – Autumn Sequence

posted in: Animation, Uncategorized | 3

Just as the nice weather is coming back, we just finished animating the last storm shots. That’s good news for us because we’ll finally have the chance to try out new ambiences, but also for you since we’ll be able to show you more animated shots from now on.

We’ll start out with a short clip of three shots taking place during autumn. It’s a simple capture taken from our 3D scene, so don’t be surprised if there’s no lighting and a few odd glitches. Just see it as a little tease of what’s to come – we promise the final shots will be much better!

Well that’s it, we hope you enjoyed our little sequence. Have a good week everyone!

Week 65 – Cloth Simulation

posted in: Animation, Effets | 0

Since wind plays a major role in our film, we spent a lot of time developing an easy way to add cloth simulation on our characters. Obviously, animating every piece of cloth individually in each shot would have been counterproductive, so we found a way to combine the best of two methods : Caches and Clusters.

Caches are files that contain the position of every point of a geometry over time. They allow us to simulate our clothes in the wind with real collisions in an external scene, and then apply the effect on our characters after they’ve been animated. Since caches are applied before the enveloppe in the modification order of the model, the simulated cloth follows the deformations perfectly.

Clusters, on the other hand, are additional controllers that let us animate parts of the clothes that are not simulated. Hats and sleeves, for example, are animated using Clusters. Since it would have been too long to animate these controllers manually in every shot, we created an animation cycle and then exported the curves in an Action file that we can import automatically with a button in our control panel.

We prepared a little video to give you an idea of how it looks in movement :

That’s it for today’s update! We hope you enjoyed this post, and see you in two weeks!

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