Show Reel 2023 | Tiphaine Toisoul

Self Portrait

Modeling

The first project I wanted to present is indeed a 3D portrait of myself! I worked on this assignment for over four months. I was really nervous to begin this project. It seemed very hard and I was not very confident about working on my own portrait but in the end I'm really proud of how it came out!

I started with a 3D scan of my head that I had to clean on ZBrush. After doing so, I imported the mesh from Zbrush to Maya to create of good and symmetrical topology for the face. I took references of face topologies and applied it onto the mesh by using the quad draw tool.

Going back onto Zbrush with a clean mesh, I created two layers of displacement: the first one to reshape the face to its proper proportions and to retrieve details that were lost while cleaning the 3D scan, the other one to add skin texture and small imperfections to the face.

UVs

In order to apply the displacement maps I had just created on Zbrush, I had to unwrap UVs. Working on a face with a symmetrical topology helped me learn how to create symmetrical UVs using the tools provided by the UV editor in Maya. I made sure to separate the UVs of the face and the glasses into two different UDIMs, that way I could easily split up the texture maps.

Grooming

Texturing

It was my second time texturing an organic mesh. I took good quality pictures of my skin and used them to add variety to the skin color. It also helped my face to look more like my actual one since the moles and freckles of my face would be correctly placed.

Creating a realistic face that doesn't look stiff or fake is pretty hard. To avoid that I added maps in the fuzz, the subsurface and the specular settings to enhance details and varieties.

I took pictures of my irises as well. I made an albedo color out of them to ensure that the eyes of the 3D model would be the same as my actual one.

Lighting

Once my portrait was completed, I had to create three different lightings. I wanted the three finals pictures to look drastically different from one to other to try out multiple ways to use lights. I carefully considered the choice of the three lighting references I would pick. I wanted to use both natural and artificial lights, both cool and warm tones and I wanted to provide colorful lightings as well as creating a contrasted black and white image. I finally decided to go for these three pictures you can see underneath. I gave up on the black and white picture since I could still work on contrasts with a colorful image.

I chose the first reference for its natural warm light and its glowing aspect. I selected the second one for its colorful artificial light as well as for the butterfly pattern and the very contrasted lighting. I picked on the last one because I wanted to create a lighting with colder tones. What I appreciate about the last reference is its authentic look: it's a lighting closer to what we could see in real life - simple, natural and ordinary.

Compositing

Once the lighting was finished on Maya, I rendered the images with Renderman. It was now time to embellish the images with compositing. This is the part of the process where the project really came to life.

For each image, I added a background picture to make it look like it was a real take. I also adjusted the colors of certain elements to match as closely as possible the references. I added glow, depth of field, lens distortion, chromatic aberration and vignetting.

Tom Natsworthy's Vehicle

The goal of this project was to create a brand-new vehicle that could be part of a feature film. I chose to invent Tom Natworthy's vehicle, one of the protagonists from the movie Mortal Engines.

Pre-Production

It seemed wiser, given the world of film, to create a flying ship, both powerful and strong enough to withstand storms but also comfortable enough to make long journeys. The idea of an airship was therefore interesting. I collected various references and produced some sketches to provide a design matching these expectations.

I started by gathering references from the vehicle appearing in the movie and concept arts made specifically for the film. I also gathered information and images of ropes in sailing boats and turbines from airplanes alongside other types of engine pieces.

Tom Natsworthy’s vehicle is a mix between a spaceship, a boat and an airship. It has many ropes that allow the balloon to be attached to the rest of the ship. I’ve done researches on how to tie ropes to boats, many of them were moored with horn cleats. They require particular types of knots: cleat hitch knots.

I then started making sketches and concept arts for my own vehicle. I made layouts of the vehicle to see whether my sketches would work or not in 3D. Once I was happy with the modelisation, I painted textures over a 3D render to choose the best materials and colors for the vehicle.

Modelisation

It took me almost two months to complete this part of the project. This airship is one of the most advanced projects I have ever undertaken so far.  Something amazing about that project was that it allowed me to focus on every small part of a more complex object. The process was relatively long but seeing the vehicle slowly coming to life was really exciting.

It me took some time to understand how all the pieces worked together in order to make the vehicle as realistic and plausible as possible. The vehicle would then be rigged, I had to think about each piece for them to fit together properly.

I started the modelisating by the main part of the vehicle. I did the same with the balloon before placing it above the body parts. This way I could create the ropes between the two parts to the right size. I finally added the reactors to the vehicle and adjusted their size to find the best balance for the airship.

Here are some close-up images of the vehicle.

Surfacing

Timelaspe

Pre-Production

This timelapse recreates a chess game that really existed: Kasparov's Immortal. This match opposed the world champion at the time Garry Kasparov and the international Bulgarian Grandmaster Veselin Topalov. It was held in 1999 during the Wijk aan Zee chess tournament in the Netherlands and is considered one of the most beautiful chess games of the 20th century. Garry Kasparov won the match.

Here are some of the references I gathered to create designs for the chessboard the chess pieces. I collected pictures of materials and the way they age to efficiently work on the texturing part of the assignment.

You will also find below sketches that I had to make to optimize the production. It is very important not to skip those steps in pre-production. Thus, I drew all the chess pieces I was about to make back then and I created a short storyboard of the shot I was planning on rendering.

Modelisation

I decided to create my own chess pieces for my timelapse to make them more complex and to match them to my will. Thus, those pieces created had several materials: their main structures were made out of wood. In addition, they got decorated with metal parts. Their bases were all composed of stones, the white ones presented a hypersthene stone and the black ones presented a citrine stone. These stones respectively represent power & endurance and concentration & self-confidence.

Since all the pieces were hard surface modelisations, I only used Zbrush to create the knight's head. The pieces were the same no matter their color and their circular aspect made it easier to modelise them.

The most important step of this assignment was to focus on the texturing part.

Texturing

Because this project was centered around the texturing, I took time to study the several materials composing the chess pieces and the way they would wear out.

For the white pieces, I wanted the wood to get darker, dirty and less shiny. For the black pieces which were painted, I wanted to see that paint coming off. As you can see on the pictures below, for both types of chess pieces the metal has been made less reflective and with more marks. The stones at the bottom of the pieces were also made denser, rougher and cracked.

The same work was done with the wooden chessboard: I made the "clean" state much less rough and less dirty for three materials.

I added dust all over the board for the "ancient" state to give the feeling of an abandoned chessboard.

Lighting

For the lighting of the scene, I wanted to have a very directional and intense light so that it created strong impacts on the chess pieces. During the ultimate game of Elisabeth Harmon against Borgov in The Queen's Gambit TV show (which is one of my references in terms of lighting). I can see a bright and very vertical light that enhance the solemn aspect of the moment, but also the power and determination of both players. I wanted to recreate that in my shots. I wanted to give the scene a tense atmosphere, but also a mysterious one by setting the rest of the scene in the dark, leaving only the pieces and the chessboard lit up. I also wanted to play between shadow and light on the board to change the lighting during the shots of the timelapse. The goal was to rotate the light so that shadows move over the chessboard but also to create a back lighting on the last shot in order to emphasize the black king. A high-level chess game can be fierce, sometimes almost ruthless, with the players having a lot at stakes. This is what I wanted to convey through the lighting of this scene.

Thank you for reading this far! I hope you enjoyed these three projects and learned more about my way of creating.

You can find all the other projects I worked on in my demo reel down below!