Here we meet CG Supervisor Stéphane Thibert, who worked on this fantastic animation called Rising from Mikros Image. The animation is the director’s cut of a project specially designed to be the opening film for Dubai International Film Festival. The festival was held in December 2012. If you’d like to find out more about Mikros Image’s Jean-Yves Parent and Michaël Moercant, take a look at our in-depth Meet the Artist interview.
3D World: What were the film’s influences, both story-wise and stylistically?
ST: The client asked Mikros Image to create a film and the only brief was that it had to end up on an opened door and show the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly to match the design of the festival poster. Besides these, Mikros Image had full permission regarding the universe, creatures designs…
Michaël and Jean-Yves tackled the project by first going through a lot of references and designed a new species for the film. They wanted to bring a special touch through their character design, light treatments and transparency effects. They wanted the caterpillar to be almost dark (alien-like in his cocooon) at the beginning. The contrast at the end is a beautiful butterfly, full of colours, almost majestic.
3D World: What did you do on the short and what was the hardest job?
ST: Our main problem was handling the stereo version. It was pretty complicated to manage particles and compositing effects with stereo. In 3D we had a tricky Subsurface Scattering shader to build and the animation’s setup was complex too. I take my hat off to Alex Sauthier (our lead animator on the project) who did a wonderful job.
3D World: How long did the animation take to produce?
ST: The whole animation took only two weeks to do with four people, and rendering took a fortnight with two people. Compositing took about a week on top of that.
3D World: What 3D software did you use and why?
ST: As usual with Mikros Image, we used Maya and Arnold for rendering, Nuke for compositing, After Effects for the motion design part (with Particular), Shave & Haircut for the fur, and ZBrush for the modelling and displacement maps
3D World: What was the most useful piece of 3D software and why?
ST: Arnold was essential in the production pipeline because of the way it handles lighting. Fast and reliable with very nice depth of field.
3D World: What was the most impressive technical aspect of the project and how was it achieved using 3D software?
ST: In my humble opinion, the setup for the first creature was the most difficult to achieve.
Posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2012 at 2:56 pm under Shorts, Showcase. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
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