2023 Student Demoreel

2023 STUDENT DEMOREEL

Welcome to my student's demo reel for 2023. I had the opportunity to work on a variety of projects during the last few years as part of my 3D Animation & VFX Master at ESMA, here are some of the bests. 

Unfortunately I couldn't put all my projects there as some where not within contest rules, like my latest one shoe modeling one, but I invite you to check them out if you got time !

Enjoy the showcase!

BARTHOLOMEW'S MAGIC FOREST

"Timothy is turning 6 years old today and has the amazing opportunity to celebrate it with his favorite TV Show's mascot: Bartholomew. Unfortunately he's also sick and the stress of standing in front of his idol won't help, unveiling an unexpected and traumatizing turn of events."

This twenty seconds short film was made as part of a team project during 6 weeks (production time). Before anything I want to thanks all the people I had the chance to work with on this very challenging project: Lunayah CORVAISIER, Maxime CRANÇON, Romain FLEISCHER, Marie ROUSSELET, Quentin THISSE & Antoine Valero.

I had the opportunity to work on a variety of fields during this production including rigging, FX, modeling, shading, lighting as well as some compositing, editing, sound-mixing and pipeline management.

In this entry I'll only cover the breakdowns of the work I've been doing, but I strongly advise you to also check the movie's entry we posted as a group here!

PROCEDURAL TERRAIN

Having a short time of production we wanted to be pretty safe about the layout of the ground of our magical TV set. This is why we chose Houdini and a procedural approach, to be able to make last minute changes if needed, which resulted being quite handy in the hand. The setup was very easy but helped us to iterate very quickly to come up with the final ground layout.

Everything is procedural: the ground, the small hills and their "toppings", the road and it's rocks as well as some scattering. Everything was also UV'ed procedurally. Eventually we replaced some of the scattering by a MASH Network in Maya, for optimization purposes.

TIMOTHY'S RIG

I was in charge of our main character Timothy's full body and facial rig. Our goal was to have a simple yet reliable, cartoony rig. I went for bendable IK/FK limbs with a hybrid spine. All the attributes are instanced on the corresponding controllers for easy access by the animators (which on this project were Maxime CRANÇON, Marie ROUSSELET & Quentin THISSE).

All the main modules were made using my own made Python auto-rig.

One of the R&D parts was to have the nose of the character, which is a separate mesh, slide on top of the nose area of the face (which we limited). I managed to project joints in real-time to a surface that matches the topology of the face using a pointOnSurfaceInfo node and some magic. Simple yet effective.

CAKE FLAME

What would be a birthday cake without a candle and it's flame ? We wanted it to be easy to generate and customizable in compositing, but we also wanted it to react to our characters movements.

Instead of going for a pyro simulation approach which could have been pretty heavy in consideration of our needs, I went for a simple yet effective popnet setup that we rendered in camera space for each shot using Mantra as an Alpha mask. This allowed for quick previsualization, rendering and implementation later on within Nuke (which was done by Antoine VALERO).

LET THE FLAME SHINE!

I was very happy to be able to do some lighting again on this project and was in charge of lighting the last shot, in which Timothy is bloomed by his idol taking fire, in a dramatic close-up shot.

A simple three lights setup with some bounce lights and fillers. The shot was later gorgeously embellished by Antoine VALERO & Romain FLEISCHER in compositing.

TUYAUTERIE

Tuyauterie was our Pipeline management software for this project. It is an external software made using Python and PySide2. It allows easy asset manipulation (create, save, publish, different stages, asset preview, scenes presets) as well as the ability to remotely connect to multiple Maya Session's to control different assets (or to import references to layout scenes for example).

It is still very much a prototype but I have plans for it in the long term. Even if it is still pretty rudimentary, it was a great help on this project as we didn't have to care at all about organizing our assets. It did it for us.

OUTER PEACE

"As an old man is set to drink his coffee on the wonderfully calm terrasse of his beach house in the wild, a vile fly appears with other plans for him."

Outer Peace is a 12 second short film on which I worked on all aspects, except of the character modeling and rigging. It was made in the spent of 3 weeks for the environment and 3 weeks for the animation, rendering and compositing. 

It was my first time dealing with script-writing and I must admit it is very hard to convey a story in less than 15 seconds.

BREAKDOWNS

We had to do the render on our own machine, which means camera movements wouldn't be an option, or we would destroy the render time. I had to fake it rendering slightly larger frames and hiding it in the blur in compositing. I must admit that with the hindsight, I over-exaggerated it, ahah.

FURCIFER PARDALIS

This one was part of the Insect project at ESMA. We were told we could also do small animals/reptiles/amphibians also instead of an insect so I was crazy enough to try doing a chameleon, with a very small amount of time and with heavy technical limitations on my side (I had to manually hand paint each scale). The full project can be found here.

I started by doing a moodboard of what I wanted the finaly piece to look like. We had to make it on a pedestal, not in a complete environment.

I then did a blockout of the shape in Maya before moving to Mudbox to sculpt the final highpoly mesh. I retopologized it and went back to Mudbox to paint the displacement map as well as the albedo. The other maps we're creating mixing the albedo with others imperfection maps, curvatures masks and so on.

LEMUR CATTA

Just after the chameleon, we had a grooming subject in which we had to do an animal head/bust. I chose a Lemur Catta and what I found particularly hard in this project was to sculpt something organic, especially a mammal.

With it being my first in real grooming project with XGen, I wasn't really satisfied at first with the result, until I worked a bit more to get the following profile shot which I find interesting, especially in B&W.

BREAKDOWNS

KITCHEN OF THE WORLD

I recently had the opportunity to rework a shot of my first year's end of the year image. I invite you to check the dedicated page on my profile for more breakdowns on this project.

In this new render I tried to make the environment and overall mood more cinematic, with a change in the camera lens as well as more compositing work.

BREAKDOWNS

A LOST STATUE

The goal on this one was to experiment with Nuke X's 3D power to create a camera movement within one of my illustrations. This was a fun one that asked me to do a lot of back & forth between Photoshop and Nuke in order to hide imperfections while the camera is moving. 

Before going into Nuke, I made 3D blockout of the illustration, that I painted over within Photoshop, but not before making some lightscripts and colorscripts to have what I wanted for the painting.

OLD COFFEE GRINDER

I really enjoyed spending time working to get the most out of a single asset. This was one of my first project at ESMA and it really made me love Shading and documenting myself about what I want to model. I decided to go a bit crazy on the final renders though, but I like how they turned out.

NIKE AIRMAX x CARHARTT

This is an older project from my first year at ESMA but I'm still quite satisfied with it, and it helped me get noticed by Fabien CLEMENT to work on another shoe project which I talked about earlier, but that I'm not able to show here. So I'm quite proud of this one and even prouder of the new one, but this one set up a milestone for me back in the day.

BREAKDOWNS

R&D and EXPERIMENTATIONS

I've been learning Houdini and digging into it as much as I could over the past year. I love how flexible and strong it is. The following projects are mostly research and development for different projects and to test out a variety of things within the software.

FLOATING PARTICLES GROWTH

I wanted to test a particle setup on my Digidouble (which is a project I still need to work on). I used multiple solvers and popnets alongside learning some VDB manipulation. I rendered a quick non-shaded preview using Mantra.

SLOW-MO BULLET THROUGH EGG

We had a FX subject this year that was open to our imagination. I wanted to try out a slow-mo simulation, unaware of the challenges it provoked. I also wanted not to retime my simulation, but actually simulate it in slow-mo, which was also a challenge. We didn't have to do a final render and the time limit was pretty rough so I could have pushed more the simulation settings, which I plan to do in a future finalized project. I kept it at the research stage for now.

This project was fun because I had the opportunity to mix a rigid body sim with a fluid sim and a vellum sim for the internal membrane. The thickness of the egg shell was and still is a big problem for the fluid simulation to evaluate properly, which is something I'm working on.

PORE MAKER

For the Digidouble project I'm working on, I wanted to inspire myself from WETA FX's research and try to generate a procedural high poly mesh with pores and micro-wrinkles. This high-poly would be used as a base to sculpt the Displacement map mixing it with Texturing XYZ projected textures.

The pores and wrinkles are generated using guide curves (in red). They're depend of concavity and convexity maps, as well as artist made mask maps to control the whole thing. The depth of each pore is controllable using maps. The wrinkles are simulated to connects the pores with a variable depth and thickness.

The outputs are a (very) high poly mesh and a displacement map with pores and wrinkles split into different channels. The output is not that clean but with some touch ups in post it becomes a viable base. But it is a very early prototype and cannot be used to generate a whole face.

In the future I want to directly bake the pores and wrinkles into UV Space which would save a lot of performance as well as giving way more detailed and precise maps. I'd also like to add more visible wrinkles made by the effect of gravity on skin. Still a long way to go.

CUSTOM MADE STITCH TOOL

I had the opportunity to work on shoes models for a project by Fabien CLEMENT, which I unfortunately cannot showcase here due to the contest rules about professional work. But I invite you to check it here and there !

I knew that to achieve a decent level on realism on the modeling, I'd have to model all the stitches, which is a painful task that I've done in the past. Considering the amount of models I had to produce, I wanted to create a reusable setup beforehand, that would serve me for incoming personal projects. Therefore I created a Houdini HDA called "Stitcher" which allows to create a variety of stitches on any model, following it's normals. Some parameters are available to edit the stitches, making all types of seams possible.

The tool is artist friendly as the only thing we have to do his to draw guide curves and edit the tool's parameters.

INFAMOUS LAST WORDS

Thanks you for checking my entry, I hope you liked the projects and that maybe they'll inspire you. If you have any requests or questions don't hesitate to contact me. I'm open to anything.

Have a great day!