Modeling and texturing all objects visible in a 3D scene is not something REALLY needed. A great time-saver technique often underrated is to create a matte painting and then map it onto simple 3D objects from the camera (Camera Mapping).

By creating simple objects as containers for our painting, we can create a 3D set that looks exactly as out original painting from certain angles and still have a sense of depth. In this video you could see how we separate in layers each element of the matte painting and then we convert those into textures we applied to simple objects like planes or low poly geometry.

Only thing we need to do, is to select an object and unwrap it from the camera view using the “Project from View” option. Such UV map we will use it to map a texture that would be the part of the matte painting that corresponds with the uwrapped object.

To make things more comfortable we have already separated the matte painting elements using layer alpha masks in Gimp, and saving these alpha masked layers into different PNG files with transparency. If needed we can later keep on painting these textures to include details that might have been occluded when we unwrapped the mesh.

All materials we used in our scene should be set to Shadeless as we don’t want to change how the image texture looks (it is supposed to be a Matte after all)

In the last part of the video, it is shown how we animated the influence of a procedural Cloud texture in the material that is added to the image textures, in order to create a lighting effect.

Hope it helps !

One of the things I enjoy the most is matte painting. Mattes are a huge time saving allowing us to skip modeling and texturing job, specially in shots like this, where the characters just pass by with no interaction with the environment.

The technique we use to create this paintings is start with a rough 3D scene to get some idea of shadows and volume and then paint over that in layers using a combination of photographic references and plain painting.

When the painting is done, we decompose it into textures and camera map them onto low-poly geometry to create an interesting “3D painting” look… but that we’ll leave it for later

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These are two frames of the work in progress of the Maesltrom shot. Our brave explorers are faced to this monster of nature in the strangest regions of the South Pole waters (where there are no records of maelstroms to my knowledge by the way )

Maelstrom shot

The “Eleanore” is just a low poly version we use for animation and while setting up the Cloth simulation and general timing-framing of the shot. All waves and whirlpool were done using Displace modifiers.

Virginia’s Facial Rig from Mercator Project on Vimeo.

After trying several approaches to get a face both expressive and easy to animate I decided to go back to Basis, this is setting up shapekeys for the face. Shapekey creation has no secrets, it takes some time to get the hang of it, and the one thing you have to be very careful about is not to forgive the additive nature of their combination.

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I’ve been slowly working on characters these weeks. Since the beginning they have been evolving as we ourselves got a clear idea of how they should look. But as usual the meshes we got didn’t have the right topology, so I started retopologing them using the great Blender’s Retopo tool.

Here a few samples of how they look before and after

As I was remodeling I did some test to try the topology using a very simple rig. Once again I couldn’t do anything but surprise myself about how well Bone Heat works.
Here Virginia wearing a Cloth simulation (in progress).

Since a couple of weeks, a new member has joined the project: Juan Angel “Redo” Redondo, an old friend of the studio. We could say a lot of things about him, Plumíferos‘ veteran, Tube’s collaborator, illustrator, sensitive soul… but best thing we can do is just show what he’s been doing for us. Juan Angel has been working on texture concepts, project’s own image/branding, and lately coloring the storyboard to help complete the light and mood concepts of all shots (task that remained incomplete after all animatic revisions).

So, without further introduction… Juan Angel: