"ULTRAMARINE"
RIGGING | LOOK DEVELOPMENT | LIGHTING | COMPOSITING
Character Breakdowns
Phoebe
Responsible for: Body and facial rig
SPECIAL SCRIPTING: Skirt
Phoebe's skirt posed a challenge as I had to create a joint setup which would mimic the movements of a hoop skirt. After many consultations with the animators, we settled on two FK chains on either side of the skirt.
Gamsol
Responsible for: Whole rig | Quadruped Auto-Rig Script
Gamsol was meant to be the scratchiest and most mobile rig of the three. I used ribbons to create "wiggles" in the limbs and wrote a series of scripts to allow the spine and limbs to stretch and twist infinitely. The facial rig was simple but allows him to create a wide array of facial expressions.
Jane
Responsible for: Body and Facial Rig
For Jane, I had to focus on making sure her facial expressions were able to convey both subtle and extreme emotions. She spends a lot of the film in the background, so I wanted to make sure her expressions were still legible.
Foliage (Houdini)
Procedurual Foliage
I developed a system in Houdini in order to create easily customizable foliage. This would allow us to populate the backgrounds of outdoor scenes, and have full creative control over the look development of the foliage.
Customization
The node system developed could be copied from file to file, and allowed total control over the leaf:
- Shape
- Scale
-Rotation
- Color
Animated Environment
The foliage system was also used in to create a painterly overlay on various environmental fixtures such as the cliff, grass, and trees. The scatter points were bound to animated geometry in order to maintain brush stroke placement on moving objects
Texturing
Hand Painted Textures
In order to maintain the stylization of the film, I hand painted almost every single asset to match the concept art. It was a challenging process, but it was streamlined with an array of custom brushes and materials. Some textures were re-worked later during production in order to fine-tune the final look of the shot. A varied displacement map was used to achieve a caked-on-paint look.
Lighting | Rendering | Comp
Lighting Guide
As Technical Lead, I was tasked with streamlining the lighting process while maintaining a heavily stylized appearance. We prioritized having a strong rim light to create an almost watercolor style outline to separate the characters. Lights were often animated to follow the characters in order to maintain this effect.
Color and Compositing
Most compositing was completed in Nuke, with final color corrections in DaVinci Resolve. We used the ASUS OCIO color space for rendering and compositing while finalizing shot colors. Procedural foliage was layered with painted and animated brush strokes to enhance bushes near the camera.
Rig Demos
The
