Nice work Vladimir and everyone at Elefant Studios!! thanks for sharing... Could you elaborate a bit on the feathers creation/placement ? I've done some feathers in the past and it would be good to hear what difficulties you had to overcome.
2013/12/2 Vladimir Jankijevic <vladi...@elefantstudios.ch> > well, the reason is the size of the studio and to a certain degree my > personal preference :) > > > On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 4:11 PM, <pete...@skynet.be> wrote: > >> That’s looking very good. >> Nice to see a film workflow going from Maya to Softimage, rather than the >> other way around. >> Any reason in particular for that – as it’s not the most common choice? >> >> >> *From:* Vladimir Jankijevic <vladi...@elefantstudios.ch> >> *Sent:* Monday, December 02, 2013 3:48 PM >> *To:* softimage@listproc.autodesk.com >> *Subject:* 'The Little Ghost' - Visual Effects Breakdown >> >> Hello List, >> >> over the course of one year, a small team here at Elefant Studios created >> a CG head replacement for a talking owl, set extensions for a steeple, >> talking ‘haunted’ paintings, background matte-paintings as well as general >> shot compositing in 111 shots for the movie ‘The Little Ghost’ ( >> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2186566/). The movie is Alain Gsponer's >> adaptation of a children's book from Otfried Preussler. >> >> The main tools we used on this project were Softimage, Maya, Mudbox, >> Nuke, Arnold and our in-house asset-management and pipeline visualization >> tool. Maya for Modeling, Rigging and Animation, Softimage for Feather/Fur >> Grooming, Scene Assembly and Lighting/Shading/Rendering. Mudbox was used >> for Texture Painting and Sculpting. Nuke was used for Compositing and >> Arnold as the rendering-backbone through SItoA. >> The biggest challenge was the creation of a head replacement for a >> talking owl. As some of the shots were planned as close-ups we had to >> consider a highly detailed implementation. Autodesk Softimage’s ICE system >> was used to model feathers in high resolution in any desirable shape. We >> developed tools using ICE to enable us to place feathers and hairs very >> accurately, always preserving the defined shape of the head and neck from >> animation. All feathers were rendered as Curves in Arnold. Lighting was >> done with Skydomes and textured Quadlights. >> We created a high detail steeple on top of a building as well as various >> extensions to tackle the limitations from the filmed set. Everything was >> rendered with high detail displacements, GI, Skydomes and all the other >> nifty features Arnold offers. >> >> Big thanks goes to Jonah Friedman from Psyop ( we used some concepts from >> his Ruffle system ), Daniel Guimard for his work on the steeple, Vivien >> Guiraud and Patrick Graf for the animation, Yukio Satoh for a nice >> animation rig, Miklos Kozary and Stephan Schweizer for the compositing and >> all the others who helped out. >> >> The Visual Effects Breakdown: http://vimeo.com/80552458 >> >> Cheers >> Vladimir Jankijevic >> > >
