Coline Meurville - 2024 Showreel

Grieving Elven Princess

"Holding in her hand the only remains of her royal past an elven princess desperately looks for help up in the above. "
-All aspects-

My main objective for this work was to tell a story with the fewest elements and draw empathy from the viewer's eye through lighting and the character's posture.

LIGHTING

Image 1:  An Old Woman -Rembrandt | Image 2: Unknown | Image 3: auto-portrait X - Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn

ATHMOSPHERE

Those images are the ones that inspired me the most to come up with this composition, from them emerges a certain melancolia and mystery I wanted to reproduce.

Image 1: Lady of Shallot -John William Waterhouse | Image 2: Personal artworks -  Felipe Castro | Image 3: Morana - Peter Polach | Image 4: Satyress - Victor Quaresma

GARMENTS

Through garments I wanted to build her identity, the drape reminds us of a Madonna in prayer and creates a link with religion to give clues on what she's looking at. For the crown, I was inspired by the traditionnal russian kokoshnik that had this peculiar shape ressembling a mitre which also gives informations about her social rank.

CHALLENGES

The two biggest challenges I had to manage were the hair length that I had to sculpt hair strand per hair strand at some point, and adapting the XYZ workflow to a blue skin shader and light it properly. My Avatar 2 reference saved me because I was  struggling a lot with the "Candle Lighting". The yellow tones of the flames were desaturating the blue of my skin so much the character seemed grey. Even though compositing helped me to resaturate the skin, in my scene I had to put a bit of red/orange to my light in order to bring back some blue. Another sub challenge was the SSS that seemed more purple when mixed with the blue, so once again I added some more orange to the mean free path color to make it seem more red and more "human".

Avatar 2 directed by James Cameron

Short movie "C'est Pas Sorcier"

A few textured props

Based on Eireen failly's Concepts

Characters retopology and sculpt

Based on Margaux Plassard's Concepts

Here is our first team short film on which I managed rigging, texturing, rendering, modeling and sculpting. I didn't do all aspects, I worked in a team of 7 wonderful people aka Margaux Plassard, Landry Monavon, Clara Desnoix, Raffael Kloten, Emma Stassi and Eireen Failly. 
This experience was such a big challenge regarding the time we had, but I don't regret anything, it was a very fun and insightful adventure. 
For the texturing I worked for the first time with Substance Painter and I must say that being able to paint at the same time in Normals, Diffuse and Specular was very efficient to achieve the look we were aiming for. After giving it some thought maybe we shouldn't have used Renderman but Arnold for a more cartoon style render and a less PBR aspect. 
Another challenging aspect was the textures switch, we had to build multiple textures for one object: the blouse had a clean version and a blood splatter version for example. I must admit we took some time to find an efficient way to make it work with the pipeline. 

Thank you for your attention !