Latest Projects - 3D rendering

Hi, my name is Raphaël and I'm here to present three projects I did on these last two years at ESMA Nantes.

THE SELF PORTRAIT - 3rd year project

The self-portrait was the last project I have done this year and I'm very proud to show it to you. We did this in our 3rd year in ESMA.

To start, we had to do a scan of our own head to avoid us to have to sculpt the whole mesh. We had then our little session with our promo where we all wore this nice fabric on our head to make our hair disappear and have the best scan we could have (which, you see, is far from the result).

After we were happy with the result of the cleaning, we did a first pass of sculpting with our main spots and differences. For myself, I knew I had several marks on my face, a piercing and a detached ear so I had to take that in count to make the portrait as close as my face. We also had the challenge to do the remeshing correctly to be rigged even though it wouldn't have served on this project.

Then went the shading which is my favorite part. We firstly did the displacement map with a UV map of skin with three layers of details and we painted each of them on our sculpt with the software Mari of The Foundry. We also did the shading entirely on it by painting them. 

Here's what my maps are. We have a classical albedo linked in subsurface, a roughness map for classical reflections, a bump map for the reliefs and a clearcoat map which add some little details in the reflections and add more brilliance to the nose and the top of the eyebrows.

For the Groom, we used Xgen Core which I found really easy to understand and fun to manipulate. I decided to have 11 layers of hairs in my self portrait; several for the fluff of the face, the eyelashes and the eyebrows and one for each side and length of my hair. Even if I had slick hair, it was still a challenge to have the wicks and the way of how my hair was.

When we had finished the asset, we had to create three original lighting to showcase our face. I choose different ambiances to test and see how far I could go.

THE MYTHICAL VEHICLE - 3rd year project

As the first project of the year, we had to do our very own mythical vehicle inspired by a movie. I chose Avatar, since their work on VFX and GCI is just astonishing.

I love the way they keep the nature close to their design so I decided to do the same.

The gorilla form went quickly into my mind. This vehicle comes straight out of the world of James Cameron's Avatar, whose first opus dates from 2009 and the second from 2022. The purpose of this vehicle is to help the base's researchers and other scientists to get around the hostile environment of Pandora.

The transport is equipped with an air filtration system that transforms Pandora's air into air that can be breathed by a human. It also has an irrigation system that supplies drinking water, and a mini purification station that filters out dirt.

The vehicle consists of a head with a two-seat cockpit. It has two enormous, gorilla-inspired arms to climb rocks and move over unstable surfaces such as sand and mud. It's 8 meters tall.

Thanks to its feet and grapples, the vehicle can hang on and put more power to its movements. To maintain stability, two antigravity stabilizers that keep the cockpit perpendicular to the ground and dampen any movement.

The cockpit is also equipped with radars to indicate the various dangers that the scientists may encounter. This vehicle is close to nature, or, in any case, adaptable to it. Its camouflage paintwork blends into the jungle mass and hides from potential dangers. At night, small LEDs light up to mimic the glow of the environment. Visible cables indicate a deliberate vulnerability, as the Na'vis population the difference with the military vehicles of other humans. Paintwork reminiscent of Omatikaya skin gives them a certain security.

But don't be fooled by their fragile appearance: these cables can withstand any kind of or other assaults. Numerous fans decorate the vehicle, enabling it to maintain a temperature of around 25 degrees Celsius. The vehicle is powered by electricity from several solar panels placed high up in the Garage, and also has a small fuel tank in case of breakdown.

For the modeling part, I decided to use Maya Autodesk which I thought was simpler next to Zbrush. I did a global form before I used the Quad Draw and do the remesh on the final result.

This asset has more than 2000 objects which includes cables, screws and other bolts.

When I had finished with the UVs, I did the shading for the first time on Mari from The Foundry. Since I only used the Hypershade from Renderman, changing software to do shading was really entertaining!

We also used Substance to extract the map of the curvature, the thickness and the normals to work properly on Mari.

Since it was hardsurface, I had fewer difficulties to understand that new software and they, I had a little fun to do little details like the dirt but also my night version. 

Since the wildlife on Pandora has a night version with the bioluminescence, I chose to do the same.

As you can see here, the painting that looks like the Na'vi's skin has a little glow that can shine in the dark. I added some spots with different colors too.

Once we finished it, we had to create a showroom to expose our vehicle. I had the not so good idea to create a giant warehouse that could hold at least four vehicles like that and other containers like we can see in the movies.

So here a few frames of the final result !

THE TIMELAPSE - 2nd year project

This was the very first time I had the chance to work on 3D (obviously) AND on music ! I was so excited since both are my passions.

The timelapse consists of having an asset that grows older (or younger) in a sequence around 20 seconds.

I chose to do mine with a dragon that we can found on the cover of the album Last Young Renegade from All Time Low.

At first I decided to mix the music Life Of The Party from this very album. I detached the vocals, the drums, the guitar and the bass, and modified moments in the song to create a unique piece of music, made especially for my timelapse.

To begin with, I created a tube that looked like my dragon to rigg it just after and make an alembic of it to put the dragon in position. It was kind of tricky because this dragon is smooth and I didn't know how to do a ribbon back then, so it has been quite a laugh for the first try.

Of course, the non-rigged version was perfect to sculpt the scales and the abdomen. I also sculpted the notch along the body.

We needed also to have a propagation map to show the first step and the last step.

I did those ones on Nuke The Foundry, using grades and roto.

I wanted the two versions as different as possible so I decided to scratch the dragon and remove the paint. We did the whole shading via Zbrush and the Hypershade from Pixar Renderman.

Next, we had to create a whole environment to put in scene our asset. I chose to make a museum room and, as the time, people and the thoughts pass, the lighting changes with different ambiances.

I was inspired by the lighting done in the clip of the album, especially in Life Of The Party, Last Young Renegade and Nice2KnoU.

My main challenge in this short was to do the effects in Nuke in sequence 3.

I started by using the original form of the dragon and I modified it by desaturated it and using a Idistort with two noises to make that scratchy shape. Then I divided it with a transform and created a chromatic abberation.

After that, I created a few shapes that we can find in the clip Nice2KnoU to add a little color with the rest. I firstly did the forms with rotos and modified them with some edge detects and color correct. I added some glow with the eFibonacci and a light wrap to connect the intial lighting to it.

SOFTWARES USED ON THREE PROJECTS :

Maya Autodesk - Pixar Renderman - Zbrush - Xgen Core - Nuke The Foundry - Mari The Foundry - Adobe Photoshop - Adobe Premiere Pro - Adobe Substance