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!

Week 61 – Rain and Mist Effects

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!

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