Week 97 – Opening shot

posted in: Concept arts, Textures | 0

Hey everyone!

We’ll do a quick update this week, since we are all way over our head with all the stuff that needs to be done before Christmas…

Usually, we use rendered 3d lights to light our scenes, but we decided to do a little different for the first few shots of the film and paint the lighting directly in the textures like in a good old 2D background. As an example, here’s a matte painting for the opening shot of the film!

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Happy Christmas shopping everyone! 🙂

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Week 75 – Cliff Textures in ZBrush

posted in: Textures | 9

Many people told us that they would like to know how we did our cliff textures, so we’re going to show you just that in this week’s post. Beware to the non-initiates, it might be a little technical!

Now, what you must know is that the canyon in our movie is enormous and in order to obtain sufficient resolution everywhere, we had no choice but to separate it in multiple pieces and work the textures separately. Of course, a lot of work went into working the pieces seams to make the whole thing imperceptible.

While the biggest part of the work was done in ZBrush and Photoshop, the first step was in Softimage, where we had to find the right dimension for each cliff piece. Once done, a first layer of subdivision and modeling was applied to have enough detail to work once in ZBrush.

Here is what the first version of one of our cliff piece looked like right out of Softimage. At this stage, the Uvs have already been unfolded and will adapt once we start subdividing the model.

The second step is to subdivide the model as much as possible and sculpt the cliff until the result is a little more realistic.

It’s now time to use a very useful technique we discovered, which consist in literally projecting the ZBrush shading onto the surface of the geometry using ZAppLink. This way, we obtain a good texture base that follows the details of the sculpt. Then we only have to refine the lines, still in ZAppLink, to obtain the following result :

Since the Uvs have already been unfolded, we can simply export the texture in Photoshop and use this painting as a base to add color and smaller details. Here’s the final texture :

The nice part about all this is that since the texture was made using the sculpt itself as a base, the details of the cliff follow the modeling very closely once we add lights!

Well that’s it, I hope it wasn’t too hard to follow. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any more questions, and see you next time!

Week 35 – Visual enhancements

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.

Well, that’s it for this week! See you next wednesday night for new updates on Le Gouffre™ !

Week 33 – Textures and anim refs

posted in: Références, Textures | 0

We’re back with more news from le Gouffre!

We went filming our new animation refs today so here’s a little edit of the best shots!

Of course it’s never perfect, but it’ll make the job a hell of a lot easier when comes the time to work out the keys poses.

As for compositing, we’ve now got 3 shots mostly finished. And we got to say, the third one is already a notch better than the first one we showed so we’ll probably end up reworking it a little. Stay tuned for more updates on this in the upcoming weeks!

For now, here are a few screencaptures that show the progress on the canyon textures… as well as Steinn’s backpack!

That’s about it for this week. See you next Wednesday!

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