Alexandre Mouriès - Rendering Projects

Hello everyone. ✌
In this post, I will present a compilation of some projects I made in 2023 and 2024, during my third year at ESMA Toulouse.

This was done as a summer project. We were tasked to present any universe/world of our choice, original or already existing.

I decided to go for an original world set in the inside of an empty mansion. I wanted to make an aesthetic that would pay tribute to liminal spaces and others environments which procure this sense of unease and familiarity at the same time. 

This setting is the place where a man wakes up without any memory of why he ended up in here. The mansion seems alive, but somehow with no signs of anyone living here. He soon discovers that the front door is locked and any exterior view just leads to a black abyss. He has to go deeper in this mansion to find eventually find an exit, or maybe other peoples stuck with him... But he quickly unravels the fact that this is not an ordinary place. Each time he opens a door, he finds himself in a place which doesn't seem to connect in any shape or form to the one he comes from. For him, there is a mystery to solve.

Modeling and animations were done with Maya. Most of the textures comes from Polyhaven and some of them, I modified on Photoshop. Rendering was made using Pixar's Renderman. I did compositing effect like depth of field, adding dust or volumetric lights on Foundry Nuke.
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Maya, Renderman and Nuke are the software I use for basically all my projects.

To me, this was a nice exercice to create a story setup. It was also a way for me to play around with this old-fashioned look that looks both empty and lived-in at the same time. An aesthetic/atmosphere which I absolutely adore.

This is a personal project and, currently my most recent 3d work. I wanted to create faithful replicas of multiple versions of the Buster Sword, the iconic weapon of Cloud Strife, main character of the Final Fantasy VII (1997) video-game.

Those designs are based (from left to right) of Final Fantasy VII (1997), the movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children (2005) and Final Fantasy VII Remake (2020). My main goal with these was to put them into three separate settings that correspond to their origins. That implies three different sword designs, three different environments and three different atmospheres. 

I made those three pictures in a way to reproduce key scenes from each of the source they came from.
-The title screen of Final Fantasy VII.
-The intro scene from Advent Children.
-The "edge of creation" scene from Remake.
 While I also made the terrain for the Advant Children and Remake render myself, the backgrounds are taken from the source materials.

I really enjoy doing fan-art like these. I feel like this kind of project allows me to explore new techniques and workflow for 3d rendering by experimenting on subjects I am passionate about, making me enter into the subject like never before.
It was also with this project that I started to seriously get into Substance Painter, which, to me, is an absolute godsend for texturing.

This was a school project we did a few month ago. The goal was to pick a character-design (original or already existing), that we would then translate in 3d and then stage it in an environment which would suits it. I decided to go with an original character.

I call this little fella Mallow. He lives in the middle of a wide cramped urban space. He is a young rebel who likes drawing and skating. When he is in a need of escapism, he gets to an abandoned warehouse in the middle of a forgotten indulstrial area. This is where he and his band of misfits built an improvised skatepark with what they had. They consider the abandoned industrial area around to be their HQ/playground where they can do whatever they want without worrying about anyone to scold them. 
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Like always, modeling with Maya, rendering with Renderman. I painted most of the textures for the character and the environment myself since I wanted to give the render a more stylised and sketchy look. Grooming was done with XGen interactive.

We were given carte blanche for our choice of design and picture format. Since a lot of what I do is mostly tending towards realistic stuffs, it was the perfect opportunity for me to make something on the more stylised/cartoony style. I really want to do more stylised stuffs in the future. There are truly a lot of stuffs I have not explored yet, but really want to do.

And here I go with another fan-art. This essentialy is my first 3d personnal project I did since I entered ESMA. At the start of the project, the goal was simply to create a model of the Xenomorph creature from the Alien franchise and give it a photorealistic look. 

This design is a loose reproduction of the design created by H.R. Giger (rest in peace) for the first movie,  (with a frankly bad result. I just have to admit). But it at least allowed me to try ZBrush for the first time. (an experience from which I still haven't recovered yet) 

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The more I continued, my ambition for this project grew and I wondered what could happen if I could insert the 3d renders into a real life photo.
I never tried something like that and my mind went racing. I started to paint in my head a fuller picture of this project, including animations, real-life atmosphere and even a fan-made title. Looking back at it, what I envisioned in my head was far too big for the time and experience I had. I mean, even by looking at the base model, there are a lot of things wrong with it.
But I still wanted to at least test the thing and put it in a real life setting with specific posing.
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For the setting, I took some photos of my school's parking garage and tried to insert the creature in the composition. 

I tried to match the style, ambiance and color correction to that of the official Alien movies. That includes Aliens (1986), Alien³ (1992) and Alien Resurrection (1997).

If you didn't guess, I am not happy at all with the creature. But I am still fond of this project because of the experimentation. Like cartoon/stylised style, I really want to continue this kind of stuff. I mean, puting 3d models into real-life footage is a significant part of special effects in movies, so I want to continue to dig into stuff like this.
I also really want to go back to this project again and push it further. And if I do, I hope I'll do a better xenomorph model 😅

You have reached the end!

If you made it this far, then thank you for stopping by.
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