Luka Croisez

Senior graduation demoreel

Luka Croisez - TD FX / generalist Houdini Maya

Press play and enjoy!

Paumo d'Amour

Graduation Project

Team of 5.

I was personally in charge of designing tools and solutions to be proefficients at building a believable environment, all the houdini aspects (procedural tools, enviro, modeling, vegetation, pyro/grain/cloth FX, groom), lighting/rendering lead (optimisation and problem solving in heavy scenes, main lighting directions to match the vision of the director).

A large part of my time was devoted to the environment. We were a team of 5 and our ambition was not to restrict ourselves in terms of scenery, so I had free rein to take care of all the environment procedurally on Houdini. Everything you see in the scenery (be it a house, a road or a car) was generated and placed "semi-procedurally". Indeed, my goal was to generate a textured final high poly from a simple 3D blocking made in 5 minutes, while leaving total control to the art direction (thus avoiding as much randomness as possible in the primary composition of the image). 

So I came up with a tool to generate a "living" village from a simple 3D blocking, but keeping all its specific features (exact shape of the house, inclination, location of doors and windows...) and to deploy it to generate the village on which the film is based, and above all to match as closely as possible the negative shapes of the key concept arts.

For the rest of my time, I created the vegetation on Houdini (needing tools to have rich vegetation adaptable to the shot, as well as having to match the art direction), was lead TD, lighting and rendering.

From procedural modeling to simulation (vellum, fluid, smoke, particles...) and grooming (of the 2 characters, "fake simulation" because the guides were animated from a Maya animation), I was able to develop and deploy a useful Houdini skillset throughout the production, which enabled us to match our ambitions as closely as possible.

PASSION 

Framestore Launchpad project

This is what bounds us all together in this profession, and so here is the personal project I did during this internship for the Launchpad at Framestore London as an FX artist.

My goal for this project was simply to sandbox as much as possible to test and learn as many new things as possible in a short period of time, and towards the end to gather several ideas to develop a coherent sequence of shots that makes sense and has a story-telling, and that is at the same time fully fx. The idea was not to focus on a single aspect, but to showcase my photographer's eye alongside my technical skillset.

Everything down to the smallest vertex was handcrafted end rendered in Houdini from scratch in +- 7 days

In conclusion, a project which allowed me to learn and test (and screw up) a lot of things in a short time. A great experience then, and a real pleasure to receive complete argued feedbacks from experienced professionals!

Singe

Grooming done in SideFX Software Houdini 18.5. Really nice first experience, and pretty fun to make.

Lighted, shaded and rendered in Arnold Maya using .ass pipe from houdini.

3D monkey model by DisneyTD (not mine).

COCO

Sequence reproduction

Group project aiming at reproduce a few shots of the film COCO. 

This project is starting to get old and is perhaps no longer exactly up to date in terms of skills, but I still find it relevant to the fact of having to "match" a sequence in a short period of time as a team. It remains a formative experience which deserves to be shown last, and which also serves to appreciate the progress made since then. Trust the process! :)

The main challenges of this project were to be able to divide the tasks according to the strengths of each person, and to succeed in obtaining the most similar result possible in the least amount of time. The management of the R&D was therefore crucial, especially in terms of FX and Lookdev.

2 months to wrap everything up was a little harsh, but we managed to get the best out of ourselves and a result that, even if it is not the exact same as the original, was at least a great source of learning and practice !