27 Mar 2013

Week 61 – Rain and Mist Effects

by David Forest | 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!

26 Sep 2012

Week 35 – Visual enhancements

by David Forest | posted in: Compositing, Textures | 2

Hey everyone!

We’re working harder than ever on the film and we’re very satisfied with the results! Sadly, we can’t show animation this time, as we would soon end up revealing the entire film, so here’s a few visual enhancements we did on the film this week.

We had a few comments about the set not being detailed enough compared to the rest of the film. It’s something that’s still being worked on.

Here’s a new pass done on the cliffs :

And the result on the rest of the canyon (still working on it) :

Comped shots are also being constantly enhanced. As soon as Thomas is waiting for a new render, he goes back to old shots to refine what we already have. Here’s shot 2 for instance, with a depth treatment that makes Steinn stand out much better.