Cuddles - Season III
"I'm like that" single cover
Alternate versions - This is actually the 3rd version of the fur you can see bellow
Fur Version 01 VS Fur version 03
The Live show in LA
This last season was even more intensive on the project aspects, for the NFT launch party, Cj asked me if it was possible to create a show to be projected as live hologram on stage. Of course. The most complex aspect was to edit the different recorded mocap sessions into one animation that would be around 5 minutes long and also to deal with all the fur bugs. In the end I had to virtually shave some unwanted flying hair in some areas by hand in post. So much other issues we still don't see in the final performance, this reminded me the work I achieved on Christmas in Alsace projects!
The fun part was to create cloth simulations almost in real time using Pflow, this process produced as fast as heavy alembic files to deal with.
On stage fog come from Embergen sim exported as Alembic and loaded in Max to be rendered on Arnold.
At the very begining of producing this new project I had the great idea to propose the render to be 60fps for the feeling of a real character on stage, this nightmarish idea could be achieved with Topaz tools in the same time as upscaling the rendered sequences.
Managing the whole CG part alone was a great experience, never do that kids.
The live show use an alternate version of the fur: less and thicker hair to avoid too long render times even on the GPU
While working on the facial animation, I decided to update the facial morph targets of Cuddles to get more expressive poses. I explain the workflow in this article: https://www.artstation.com/blogs/1k0/eAGe/advanced-facial-mocap-retargeting-create-morph-targets-from-other-meshes
The results are on the left:
Light passes on a make up test
Xmas time
After the show we jumped on a more simple project: a fake commercial. At that time, Ornatrix had a bug at render time in Arnold and couldn't handle the DOF and Motion blur at the same time, the fur wouldn't follow the skin deformation of the character. In the short amount of production I had, the solution was to go on Unreal engine and render the animation using the Path tracer. The quality is far from perfect but good enough for a tight deadline project. The falling Xmas balls were created using Niagara and it was really tricky to set up the right way, this explains why the balls have a weird behaviour after a few bounces, rotating up to avoid their heads to pass through the ground.
See you on Season IV
