Blessed Mother

For the "Film of the Year" category of The Rookies Awards 2024, I'm glad to present you "Blessed Mother", the work we carried out as final thesis during our last month at Skyup Academy. This work takes inspiration from the "Diablo IV" announce trailer "By Three They Come", where Elias invokes Lilith and she is born once again.

0. First things first: organizing the work

As Skyup Academy intends the thesis as a pipeline simulation, everybody has their own role and we divided our work into departments, which were Prezviz, Modeling, Shading and Texturing, Rigging, Animation, Lighting and Compositing. Being just a team of eight people we had to do a bit of everything, but Lead Artists would manage the organization and reviews of their own departments. Here there is an example of our organization, in this case for modeling; we made a catalogues of all the assets we could see in the scene, and the Lead together with the CG Supervisor would assign the various tasks to the people, according also to their personal predisposition towards a particular role:

1. Gathering all the references

First day was entirely dedicated to the reference search, as well as the camera match, which we will talk about in depth in a moment. As this was the most extensive work we had faced until that moment, we made sure to have a great amount of material before diving into further stages. Having two characters in scene, we gathered anatomical references, as well as studying all the materials we could find in the scene.

We also did a colour study of every shot, in order to understand the mood we were going for:

2. Camera matching

One of the most critical aspects encountered both in the Previz phase and in the subsequent stages was the camera placement, specifically the challenge of choosing the focal length. For example, in shot 4, after calculating the volumes of all the objects in the scene and positioning the cameras using the original frames, we noticed that in our scene, the entire environment seemed much smaller compared to the reference:

However, modifying the focal length caused excessive distortion in the foreground columns, making them appear much more oblique than they actually were, and the characters seemed much smaller compared to the original shot:

After several attempts and using the columns and the triangle formed by them and the edges of the safe frame as reference points, we managed to find a focal length that made the environment appear grand and spacious without excessively distorting the elements.

3. Modeling

Modeling was split mainly into two bigger parts: characters and environment. 
Regarding Lilith, we started from a base female mesh, to be sure to have the right topology to rig and animate her and to speed up the process a little bit. We then moved on to split the head and body, so we could work on the two parts simultaneously but with the freedom to assign the two parts to different artists. 

A great challenge was getting Lilith’s horns right, both with the shapes and the technique. We blocked them by using the Sculptris Pro tool in ZBrush, being as precise as possible not to ruin the topology near the hair line and the ears, as that could’ve caused problems when retopologizing the head manually in Maya. 

After that, we moved onto sculpting the secondary shapes and then surfacing them manually, without using any pre-made displacement map.

As far as Elias is concerned, we started with a base mesh for him as well, and morphed the face until we were satisfied with the resemblance. As we did for Lilith, we gradually built up the various shapes starting with the first level of subdivision to get the primary ones, and moving on to the following levels just when we were entirely satisfied with the previous one.

The environment was kind of a challenge, as the scene is poorly lit and we couldn't grasp much of what was happening behind Lilith's mantle. Moreover, we couldn't find any concept art about this environment and the cinematic was the only reference that we had. We decided to build four main assets: the stone floor, the monolith (instanced three times), and the skeleton statue together with a generic coloumn (both instanced twice):

4. UVs

As soon as an asset was completed, we immediately did its UVs and set the texel density. To have a clearer idea of how to place them into UDIMs, we created a Maya scene that acted as a catalogue for all our assets, and we worked our UVs in there:

5. Cloth and Simulation

Elias's dress was a complete challenge because, in addition to being composed of multiple layers, it is mostly rigid. Therefore, during the simulation phase, we had to find a balance between the adherence of the dress and the rigidity of the fabric. During the study of the references, we divided the dress into three parts: the "base" dress, which is a simple long, sleeveless dress important for the skirt; the upper top, composed of long sleeves, gloves, and the relevant decorations; the cape, which serves as a head covering. To facilitate the scene setup, we duplicated the dress four times, one for each scene, keeping only the parts of the dress visible in the camera. This approach made the simulation faster, lighter, and more manageable.

6. Shading & Texturing

This shot had one major complication: Lilith's look. To recreate it, we had to make four different shaders which were put together during the compositing phase:

The first one was a red "jelly" shader, to give to Lilith the transparent bloody look; the second one is a shader with black diffuse that only shows reflection; the last ones were a skin shader and a light shader that would work as a mask for the previous one.

Although Lilith didn't have as much texturing as shading, we compensated with all the other assets:

7. Rigging and Animation

Having two characters, we had to face some challenges in the rigging process. Every rig had to be well weighted in order not to distort our protagonists' meshes.

The second shot required actually some additional work, as it would show Lilith doing various face expressions and moving her eyes from looking up, to staring right into the camera. We went for some blendshapes, that perfectly did the trick and brought our Lilith to life .

Blendshapes were made for Lilith's heart as well, so that we could animate the heartbeat in the third shot:

8. Lighting

The lighting phase also presented its difficulties because there is an element in all the scenes that decisively influences both the lighting and the texture rendering: the fog. This element allowed us to recreate the central light beam that provides the mystical atmosphere surrounding the birth of Lilith. 

9. Compositing

Compositing was made in NukeX. Not only was compositing essential to bring Lilith's shaders together to give her that glowy, emissive look, but also kicked the overall quality of the shots.

And if you feel like seeing some nodes, here they are:

In closure, here there is our work compared to the reference we followed:

AKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the Diablitas and Diablitos of the team who contributed to this work:
Giulia Filipputti - CG Supervisor and Lead Texturing
Arianna Smacchia - Lead Modeling
Anna Santinon - Lead Lighting & Previz
Adriana Infante - Lead Rigging
Giorgia Gelsomino - Lead Animation
Samuele Giunta - Lead Compositing
Angelo Cavaliere - 3D Artist
Samuele P. Mondola - 3D Artist
Special thanks to Mattia Gravina, who composed this soundtrack specifically for this work, setting the right mood for our thesis.
Last but not least, I want to thank Mauro Baldissera, director at Skyup Academy, Chiara Rovoletto, vice-director; Alessandro Maschietto, compositing mentor who gave us great help in the last stages of our work. A huge "thank you" to the rest of Skyup Academy staff, who guided us for six months and made all of this possible.