Very nice work! Congrats Valdimir and Elefant Studios team.
On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 9:48 AM, Vladimir Jankijevic < [email protected]> wrote: > 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 > --
