PRODUCTION 

Why ?

The goal of producing internal productions is twofold. The first and main goal: passion. This allows teams to have fun on a project that is important to them. The second is to experiment with our production pipeline and continually improve it. Indeed, it is always difficult to set up new production techniques during customer projects with longer deadlines.

The team

So that's the goal we set for ourselves with a talented and motivated young team: to make a humorous fake ad. The project is directed by Manon Carrier, Johan Cayrol, Etienne Fagnere and Pauline Grégoire and supervised by Ludovic Habas.

The production pipeine

For this short film our pipeline use the Adobe suite for the pre-production part, the compositing and the editing, Zbrush for modeling, Substance painter for texturing. For the animation part, 3ds Max is the spine of the set, equipped with FX Forest Pack and FumeFx plugins and finally the 3D Redshift engine for rendering.

Two pipeline management plugins are being tested on this production: Vexus and SmartRefs.

Storytelling &storyboard

For this short film everyone has looked for an original idea and the group has naturally gone to one of them.

Then we work on the storyboar. The storyboard show all the key sequences of the short film in the form of a comic book simplified. With the storyboard in hand, a first production schedule was drawn up to define all the key steps to follow.

2D layout and design

The storyboard was set in motion to create a 2D layout. This allows us to easily check our timings, to validate them all the movie.

Character design

The character design was done in parallel. The goal was to get a design that would raise the comic effect and two characters which works well together.

Production 3D

Then, the team separated by specialty to start the 3D production. The characters began to be builded on ZBrush and then finalized on 3ds Max. This is a delicate step because you have to be able to translate the 2D designs into 3D. Same thing for the props modeling.

Texturing

Once the first models are well advanced, the work of texturing on substance painter can start.

The goal is to obtain visually credible materials while respecting design visuals. Each garment, each object is therefore the object of particular attention to find the good graphic rendering.

Rigging et animation

Rigging is our strong point in CG-Animation. This consists of defining all the points of articulation of the characters or objects that will come into motion during the film.

In summary, we create a skeleton for our characters and "stick" their skin. A technical job.

Once the rigs ended, our characters became real digital puppets. The animator then starts his work which consists of making them move. A meticulous work which requiring a great sense of observation and patience. Indeed, there are 25 frames per second to get the illusion of movement and therefore as much pose to work to give life to our characters.

Environment and rendering

If on other projects these two steps are usually separated, in this movie each shot having almost its own environment, we have done the two together, the environment building and the scene lighting was worked together. A meticulous work that brings the scenes to life. However, we must be patient because the machines will have to calculate all the images created and it can take a lot of time.

FX

Special effects can reproduce virtually but realistically visual effects that would be too long, too expensive, impractical or even impossible to do manually. They often ask for advanced technical skills. On our short film they are quite numerous and important. These are for example simulation of snow, fog or the hair of our characters. This step, which also requires a lot of machine resources, starts once the animation and environments are completed. It brings credibility to the images.

Compositing and editing

Compositing is the art of assembling all the elements made by each department and correct the color of each sequence to improve them. The point of honor that comes to highlight all the work done until then by everyone. Next the editing which consists of putting end to end each composite sequence to finalizes our short film.