Student Demoreel 2023

One of the big  project of the year : the digital double. 

Several months of works to achieve a realistic representation of myself.

The process

The head

I started by the photogrammetry step, after shooting my head from all angles, I converted thoses pictures into a 3D scan, using Agisoft Photoscan.  Then, using R3DS Wrap, I converted this scan into a mesh with a usable topology, avoiding to retopologise it myself.

Once done, a long work was still needed to get a shape looking like me. I spent a lot of time switching between maya and mudbox to sculpt and model the face, but also the eyes, meniscus and other details. I used the pictures from the shooting as references, as well as anatomy references.

After this long step, I wanted to bring more life to my face, and worked to give it a facial expression. I used Unreal tools and sculpt in mudbox to create an expression and make it match to mine. This step was hard because we have a unique way of using our face muscles to create expressions, making it hard to recreate in 3D.

The skin

The mesh was finally done. While I was working on the facial expression, I also started working on the textures for my face. I started by the displacement, using as a base some Texturing XYZ maps, and adapting them on mari to match my face. After, I've pushed the details on mudbox, mari and photoshop to get some more wrinkles and skin details.

The next texture step was the roughness. Here, using the Texturing XYZ maps of the displacement, and adjusting them in photoshop, I was able to get the proper shinyness of my skin.

One of the final step was the albedo. And to get a closer result of my original skin, I took pictures of my head using polarized filtres. Then, by removing shadows and hairs on photoshop, I got a nice albedo map of my face that I just projected on my model using mari. By making some changes on my albedo map, I quicly got my SSS map that I adjusted for my render.

Finally, I gave a little bit more details to my skin, using fuzz and single scatter on certains areas.

All those steps to get this result, my hairless double.

The Hairs

I then used Maya Xgen Interactive workflow to create my hairs and body hairs. I tried to match my own references, using mirrors and pictures to get a close result. I started with guides to give the overall flow, separated in several descriptions.

I have then created the hairs, spent time to groom and shade them to get a good result.

Compositing

To finish the project, I used Nuke to improve my renders a bit, bringing them to life by adding a simple background and some lens imperfection.

That's how I've achieved this project. It was really interesting and I learned plenty of new stuffs. You need to be really rigorous and precise to get something close to what you look like in real life and I enjoyed a lot doing this. That's one of my best school project, and I hope that my involvment springs of the results.

Another great project of this year : the Zapping.

6 weeks of production in a team of 7 to create from scratch a short film of 30 seconds. 

I have been working and managing several things, pipeline, texturing/shading, render and compositing mainly. 

Our short film have his own dedicated page, so if you are interested I invite you to go and check it !

Oh My Boat - Shortfilm

The Process

I will mainly focus on the compositing part, something that I really enjoy. 

I first started by compose the shot with the differents renders. To optimise our time, we separated all the parts of our shot to render them as soon as they where done. We started by the water, and finished by our characters.

After making this in place and adding the windows roughness with the help of their st map, I started adding details.

First, I adjusted the exposure outside, the depth of field and the halo.

Then, I added the missings details insides, the screens etc. I also added details in the eyes, such as lacrimas and caustics to bring life.

Finally, a bit of colorgrading, the sun halo and a lens flare made by my teammate.

For the whale, I made a particle simulation in Nuke to recreate the drops of waters from the whale. I used Idistort mainly to create that effect. I applied then some colorcorrection and motionblur to sell it.

And to conclude, the same thing with the halo and the lens flare.

That's it for my compositing job on this project. Of course that's just a part of the work that was done in compositing, and in the project in general. All the team has made an incredible work to create this.

Thank's for reading !