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 57 – New animated sequence

posted in: Animation, Compositing | 9

Hey everyone!

It’s been a while since we showed you any new shots so we decided to give you a little treat this week and present you a sequence of seven final shots with the little girl. It’s always a big dilemma to decide what we can afford to show you or not but since there aren’t too many spoilers this time, we figured you’d be glad to see more animated content.

So here it is: the longest sequence of continuous shots we’ve shown until now!

Well that’s it, we hope you liked it! Please let us know what you think, and see you all around at the next update!

Week 53 – The return of the Render Beast

posted in: Animation, Compositing | 5

Hey everyone!

First of all, some very good news for Le Gouffre™… we received yesterday by Fedex our computer that was broken! The motherboard had to be changed, but now the Render Beast is back in full force. This means we’ll soon be able to start rendering frames faster and even while we work!

We’re also very proud to show you the two latest shots composited by Thomas. We did a lot of development regarding the wet look of the ground. We hope you’ll like the result!

First, in video:

And, why not, a HD pic of each one so you can better appreciate the work that went into it.

That’s it! See you soon for the next updates on the film!

Week 47 – Christmas

posted in: Animation | 1

What a year!

We had a certain idea of what was waiting for us with this project, but never did we anticipate it would be so hard. Or so rewarding!

Obviously, we would have prefered if our main computer didn’t die on us without warning. We also would have liked to be able to stay on schedule and actually be doing our last shots before leaving for the holidays. But things didn’t go exactly as planned. This project is just gigantic. It might very well be the most important thing we ever did.

But don’t worry, moral is at its best, and the project is now going at full speed. Now that every pre-prod element is completed, I’m finally able to help Carl with the animation. That means we now spend 100% of our time getting out shots while Thom is doing the lighting and compositing. During the last months, we fixed almost every single texture or render problem, found a visual style we like, and refined the animation style.

We don’t know exactly how long it will take before we can finish this film, but one thing is certain, we’ll do everything it takes to make it the best possible. And believe us, it’s gonna be worth it!

Since it is our last update before the holidays, we wanted to celebrate properly. It’s been a while since we showed you any new animation shots, so we thought it’d be the perfect moment to show you my first sequence, along with the very first shot featuring the little girl!

Happy holidays from the entire Le Gouffre team! Thank you infinitely for your support, and come back in 2013 for the latest developments on the film.

Week 36 – Shot 019_110

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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