Project Wolf Hunting

The Beginning

This last year I joined an Superior degree at Animum School in order to understand the creative process behind the creation of 3D environments and improve my professional skills. During the last three months I started this journey through the steps of 3D Production.

We received from the school a selected list of animated sequences created by former animation students at Animum, we had to choose one and develop the visual style from references from our selection.

1. Preproduction

I received from the school all the material needed so I only had to decide what animation to choose, I looked references for several animations with different themes, After deciding what could be the most suitable acording with the schedule but of course,  with a strong visual style, I finally choose this animation made by Francisco Freire, inspired by one of the most knowed scenes of "Pulp Fiction".

Oh, I'm sorry, did I break your concentration?

 About the theme I finally decided to use the film "Project Wolf Hunting". When I saw for first time the animation I thought in this film and his similaritis, futhermore I liked his visual style and how could work in this project. So I started looking references for the environment, assets, clothes, tattoos, hairstyle and lighting.

2. Modelling

Blocking

After I received the approbation for my idea, I started creating a blocking that will be a great guide to establish the scale and position of the assets, also for create a list with the props that I will need to made later, or how the lights will affect the environment.

Final Modeling

With the blocking validated I started doing the definitive props , for some more complex assets like the electric boxes at the background I used Quixel Megascans.

At the same time one asset was modelled I did the UV´s for not getting overwork later and let everything ready for create the textures

Clothes

Before ending the modeling phase I did the character outfit in Marvelous Designer, once I reach what I was looking for I exported it into Maya for an properly retopologize. I made two models one more optimized with straight topology for simulation phase, and other one keeping some details from the original Mesh.

3. Texturing and Shading

With all the assets ready for been exported, I started one of my favorites stages, creating the textures for the environment, clothes, character skin and prop, in Substance Painter, I had to use later Arnold Render so I used PBR system for best results.

When I finished I imported the textures into Maya and set up the differents Arnold Shaders I also adjust some textures using color corrections and remaps, for getting the same results as Substance Painter.

4. Grooming

For this phase I looked for more references focused on the hairstyle, In order to create the X-Guides I studied the hair and created different sections acording to hair length, shape and density, for this I used Masks, density mask and expressions on X-Gen.

5. Simulation

With textures finished I started using NCloth dynamics to simulate the fabrics, this was definely the hardest phase and with more complications, I had to adjust the geometry at some part of the animation to avoid overlapping during the simulation. I also adjusted the parameters to reach the better result.

When I receive the appropriated feedback and did the following corrections I exported the simulation cache to optimize the scene and reduce render times. 

6. Lighting and Render Layers

With the environment, character, hair and simulation in differents files I only had to create a new scene and reference every part of the project into this new one. This will reduce render time and avoid doing any destructive change by mistake. After check up that everything was working right I started adding Arnold Lights.

Once finished I create different Render layers to be reassembled in Post-production and doing colors corrections for a better look.

7. Composition

With renders done I composed then in Nuke, I started with color corrections to made it look like I wanted, then I added more details such as depth blur, lens distortions, chromatic aberration and vignnette, for integrate all layer and made it more attractive.

Finally, I exported the image sequence into DaVinci Resolve for adding the audio track and exporting the final video.

Thanks for watching, that was my path through this awesome project.