Generalist Demoreel - Guilhem Bergon

Machine Room - Harvester

This is the first and main environment I was responsible for my graduation movie. The story takes place inside a giant spaceship recycling space debris. The main inspiration was Alien and its industrial aesthetic.

I was responsible for the concept, modeling, set dressing and lighting rendering. The main challenge was the scale and details needed to achieve the industrial look full of details we wanted. I worked in collaboration with an hardsurface modeler to produce all the assets needed. While modeling we thought carefully what we needed to do once and what we could reuse and make procedurally to be the most time efficient. As for the texturing, some was done in Substance Painter but most of the objects where shaded procedurally inside Houdini and V-Ray.

The lighting had to be realistic ( spot lights and even lighting in a work environment ) but interesting visually by having contrast between bright and dark spot. The lighting also helped to give a sense of scale with a lot of little visible lights in the background.

For the sake of the story we needed two lighting ambiances, I thought logically how to integrate them in this same environment ( gyro lights for alarm, spot lights to light conveyor belts, giant light panels on the ceiling ).

Another big challenge was optimizing those scenes for rendering, we used only V-Ray proxies for the final rendering scenes and instancing was also used as much as I could on repeating geos. This workflow also allowed us to share the scene easily between us and we could work on different steps like FX, modeling or set dressing at the same time.

Jungle Airfield

I wanted to create a realistic environment to change a bit from scifi, I had a lot of fun gathering infos about jungle forests, their tree species and look.

I started by creating the terrain using heightfields and setting up the lighting as quickly as possible. It was my first time using vdb for clouds and mist.

After picking 6 tree species I used speedtree to recreate them. The textures for the trunks and leaves were created from reference images. Each tree had between 3 and 6 variations and where exported to houdini.

After importing the trees and shade them I generated points to scatter them. Using masks, attribute VOPs and a bit of vex I could control which species should spawn and where. For example mangrove trees where spawned following a mask that also drives the heightfield to create the river. Those attributes also helped me to create size and color variations in the forest.

I wanted to add a point of interest in this environment and went for a plane taking off from an old runway. The plane and warehouse were found online, the runway was sculpted in zbrush and textured in substance painter.

To create the transition between the runway and the dense forest, I reused my palm trees and created some bushes inside houdini. The grass was made by using grooming rather than scattering asset or cards.

Then it was a matter of creating different render layers mostly to control my mist and atmosphere in comp.

In Nuke I mostly did color grading and some issue fixing.

Space - Harvester

This is another environment from my graduation movie, the earth's orbit polluted by space debris.

For the lighting, we wanted to feel the time passing by so I varied the light angles as if the spaceship made several turn around the earth. For each shot, depending on their meaning in the story, we used more or less dramatic lighting, balancing light and dark depending to emphasize the emotions we wanted to give.

I had to be very careful with optimization because of the large amount of instances and the spaceship itself that was quite heavy so again we worked using proxies and caching as much as we could. I also made an little HDA to load the spaceship allowing us to load only parts of it, in vray proxy or alembic, so we could load only what was visible in the shot to lighten the scene size.

I was in charge of layout, scatter and lighting rendering on those ones. The massive scale of scenes was a big challenge to manage, we wanted to stay credible in terms of scale. After layouting the cameras and objects it became obvious that I would need an efficient way to scatter debris and animate them. While working on one shot and defining the look of it I created an HDA and developed a workflow after a lot of trial and errors to create the debris. This made my life way easier as it was just a matter or reapplying the same recipe for each shot instead of doing it over again. I started by blocking out boxes where I wanted my debris, my HDA allowed me to scatter points inside those shapes, control their movements and I could easily set and replace the objects scattered with a chance factor for each object to be spawned. This was the major part of my work on those shots and I had a lot of fun doing it !

Organic Mass

I wanted to do something more abstract and play with procedural modeling in Houdini. For this project, my goal was to create something that felt organic but unrecognizable. Smart Materials were done in Substance Painter, rendered with V-Ray.

Alarm - Harvester

This shot is also part of my graduation movie. It was the opportunity for me to do a full aspect shot as it was a standalone in the sequence. I had fun making the camera movement and compositing and pretty happy how this little shot turned out.

Abandoned Railroad

This was for me a refresher of unreal engine, I was inspired by the forest railway of Taipingshan. I had made a project with UE 4 and I wanted to try out all the new features and power of UE 5. I was amazed by how easy it was to paint foliage, and trees. I wanted to try megascan trees for a long time and using them and the bridge plugin was really fun, I could put my brain aside and just play with the assets, really a good experience.

I tried making the terrain in UE but in the end went with  Zbrush and houdini, I did the grading and lens effect in Davinci Resolve.

Core Reactor - Harvester

This is another environment I was responsible for my graduation movie. The story takes place inside a giant spaceship recycling space debris. The main inspiration for this one was Akira Cryogenic Containment Unit.

I was responsible for the concept, modeling, set dressing, lighting, rendering and compositing. This environment is more organic while remaining industrial, this is the core of the problem in the story so I wanted it to be more destroyed and impacted by what was going on in the spaceship. A lot of this environment was kitbashed to save time while respecting the overall shapes and feel I wanted. As for the texturing, some was done in Substance Painter but most of the objects where shaded procedurally inside Houdini and V-Ray.

This is where our hero has to face its biggest challenge so the lighting was a lot more dramatic with strong directional light.

Pod Re-entry - Harvester

I wanted to dive more into Hardsurface Modeling for my graduation movie so I was in charge of the escape pod asset.

I was responsible for the modeling, texturing and modeling of the escape pod based on a 2D Concept from Nicolas Beyaert. It was challenging because of the shape of the pod, I had to make sure that every element followed the curve of the pod. I used kitbashes to fill in some part of the model. It was a very fun process to try and stay as close to a concept as possible, figuring out how to translate it in 3D and making the concept work. I also learned a lot about Substance Painter in the process !