21 Nov 2012

Week 43 – Little technical issue
by | posted in: Textures | 5

We’re back!

The least we can say is that we had our fair share of emotions these last few weeks. As we were getting all excited about rendering our entire set for the first time, our main computer crashed on us with a smell of burning. Verdict: the water-cooling system is done for and leaked everywhere. The replacement piece is on its way, but until then, our precious render beast will have to take a break.

Luckily, we didn’t lose anything (except a day cleaning the leaks) and we managed to transfer the project on Carl’s computer. So more fear than harm was done, and the project is back on track!

We even succeeded at rendering the set without exploding another computer, so that’s encouraging. Here’s the last test for the autumn look in HD:

As always, don’t hesitate to leave a comment!

24 Oct 2012

Week 39 – Village textures
by | posted in: Textures | 1

Hey everybody!

Since I took upon myself to finish the village textures this week, we thought we’d show you the result. There are no lights, fog or other render effects for now… this is just a quick screen grab to show you where we are at.

Of course, the mill also had a beauty treat!

That’s it for this time. Thanks for coming by and see you next time!

10 Oct 2012

Week 37 – Trees
by | posted in: Textures | 1

Hello everyone!

This week, we would like to demonstrate the technique we used to create vegetation in our film. Since we want a painterly style which is hard to reach with standard modeled trees, we decided to apply a texture to one-dimensional planes instead.

Obviously, the trees won’t be able to react correctly to light this way, so we are working on multiple versions of the texture (each having a different lighting) that we will switch depending on the direction of the sun in the shot. As for the shadows, they will be cheated using a second version of each tree, invisible and rotated 90 degrees, so that we can get a shadow even when light comes from the side.

One of the great advantages of this technique is that we can add a lot of trees without making our scenes too big or unstable.

So, here’s the texture :

And the result in an unlighted scene :

That’s it for now. See you next week!

3 Oct 2012

Week 36 – Shot 019_110
by | posted in: Animation, Textures | 1

Hello everyone!

For the animation lovers out there, here’s a new shot that Carl animated last week! Note that we will start naming shots with their actual production name from now on to make it simpler for us. So today, the shot we’re showing you is the eleventh of the nineteenth sequence.

Apart from that, here’s a little update on the set textures. I’m still working on low-rez camera-projected textures, but as soon as I’ll be satisfied with the overall colors, I’ll start transfering it back on the models containing UVs so that I can fix all the glitches resulting from the projection. Here’s an example of a new color pass I did on this part of the set.

That’s all we got for this week. See you next time!

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