Hello List, over the course of one year, a small team here at Elefant Studios created a CG head replacement for a talking owl, set extensions for a steeple, talking ‘haunted’ paintings, background matte-paintings as well as general shot compositing in 111 shots for the movie ‘The Little Ghost’ ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2186566/). The movie is Alain Gsponer's adaptation of a children's book from Otfried Preussler.
The main tools we used on this project were Softimage, Maya, Mudbox, Nuke, Arnold and our in-house asset-management and pipeline visualization tool. Maya for Modeling, Rigging and Animation, Softimage for Feather/Fur Grooming, Scene Assembly and Lighting/Shading/Rendering. Mudbox was used for Texture Painting and Sculpting. Nuke was used for Compositing and Arnold as the rendering-backbone through SItoA. The biggest challenge was the creation of a head replacement for a talking owl. As some of the shots were planned as close-ups we had to consider a highly detailed implementation. Autodesk Softimage’s ICE system was used to model feathers in high resolution in any desirable shape. We developed tools using ICE to enable us to place feathers and hairs very accurately, always preserving the defined shape of the head and neck from animation. All feathers were rendered as Curves in Arnold. Lighting was done with Skydomes and textured Quadlights. We created a high detail steeple on top of a building as well as various extensions to tackle the limitations from the filmed set. Everything was rendered with high detail displacements, GI, Skydomes and all the other nifty features Arnold offers. Big thanks goes to Jonah Friedman from Psyop ( we used some concepts from his Ruffle system ), Daniel Guimard for his work on the steeple, Vivien Guiraud and Patrick Graf for the animation, Yukio Satoh for a nice animation rig, Miklos Kozary and Stephan Schweizer for the compositing and all the others who helped out. The Visual Effects Breakdown: http://vimeo.com/80552458 Cheers Vladimir Jankijevic
