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After a short break to help
consume the beer handed out by the impromptu bar staff from
Bournemouth University (thanks Georg and Steve!), it was straight
back into the next talk from Passion Pictures.
Antoine Moulineau, CG supervisor, presented a very interesting
and in-depth talk on the production of the latest Gorillaz
music video, El Manana. They had only 8 weeks and a total
of 15 artists (including 2D) to be able to produce the film,
and so working non-linearly was key, and they always looked
for the most time-saving approach. He stressed that they evaluated
a number of different software solutions with no bias towards
one package, and XSI was the most efficient way of tackling
the majority of the production. The Sasquatch plugin for Lightwave
was used for the grass due to render times, but
all of the 3D effects work, modelling, texturing and lighting
was handled in XSI. Other software that was used to create
the final film included Point Oven to transfer data to and
from Lightwave, Zbrush for the rocks and displacement as well
as hi-res modelling, Softimage|Toonz for the 2D animation,
Photoshop for textures and After Effects for compositing.
Obviously in the time frame all of this required some serious
organisation, and lead TD Nikos Gatos gave us an extensive
overview into the pipeline that they created. They used XML to create a .scntoc scene parser, and
were able to create auto-savers which assisted with keeping
naming conventions intact and could name render files, even
without opening xsi, as well as an overall shot management
tool where the latest progress on each shot could be tracked
and director comments could be added.
One way that Passion were able to speed up director approval
for shots was to provide a CG layout using real time shaders,
and paint over where necessary. This was essential also for
placement and planning of the SFX; smoke, flames, dust, bullet
holes, and clouds.
Models were imported from Lightwave originally though they
were found to be too low polygon and Mario Ucci used Zbrush
to add further detail. XSI Particles were used for the majority
of the FX work, and in combination with custom shaders were
able to cope admirably.
Lukasz Pazera, lead lighting artist, gave an overview of the lighting and compositing
process; using several example shots he talked us through the
various stages of the shot, from CG layout to final render.
He also showed an example After Effects compositing file that
contained over 80 layers, which was not uncommon for each
shot, and was a mixture of live action cloud footage, xsi
clouds, painted textures, 3d objects, lighting, colour correction
and all the elements that created each shot, which emphasised
the level of complexity and attention to detail in the final
film.
Unfortunately technical problems meant that we couldn't screen
the final film, but you can find on the Passion Pictures
website:
www.passion-pictures.com
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