An animated short movie project about Love, Death, Poetry and Madness.

Maelstrom aproaching !

20 January 2010

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 :P )

Maelstrom shot

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.

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Virginia’s Facial Rig

13 January 2010

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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Retopo, remodeling

20 December 2009

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).

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Welcome aboard Redo !

27 November 2009

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:

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Art in Mercator, first steps

11 September 2009

In these posts, Manuel “Picasus” Perez, tell us a bit about the artistic research process, tha backs and forths in the hunting that started when we first began to think about this story.

I was asked to write a bit about the Art of this project. This is the area that I like the most of all the preproduction stage.

When we started, we had a raw draft of the current script, the story was pretty simple although not completely defined yet at that point, a tale of adventures in the sea, a captain, his wife, the ship, the ice and an exploration travel with no clear destination (there was more, but I can’t tell). First thing I did was to test in Blender a couple materials I had in mind, so I made a test for wood, and a bit of ice , two of the most common materials that would appear in Mercator,. I was enthusiastic, I liked the render I’d got and it already had a feeling of what the art was going to look like.

I dropped the 3D for a while, I think it’s better to research online and in books, so I started reading, watching paintings, photographs, films, learn about ships and their history.

In the meantime I was constantly thinking about scenes, objects, colours, characters that were popping out of the storyboard, but the first thing was to set an environment, a place, and for that nothing like researching. A story can be told set in the year 500, or in 2500, the hyperspace or anywhere, the important thing is to find the environment that best fit to what we want to tell. Malefico had the idea of using a realistic aproach, not for the final render but for the look of the objects (ships, furniture, lamps, etc.).

We had lots of loose ideas like malefico’s Lighthouse render, the first drawings from his original storyboard, the material tests I made, the amazing paintings from William Bradford and the overall style feeling of Romanticism as a general concept.

I started researching about all these, and at first I studied the environment of the XV century, befor Columbus came to America, I was enthusiastic about the idea of raw and primitive technology and the idea of drifting with no precise route.

It was called the “Age of Discoveries”. I thought about a merchant ship, loaded with spices and materials to sell in distant lands, sailing through the “Route of the Silk” (the route for the ships sailing between Asia and Europe). More information about these times, by mid century the print was invented, the first stage of the “Renaissance“, people like Da Vinci, Boticcelli, El Bosco, Donatello, were walking down the streets. Here some paintings from that period.

After further talkings and checking the material I had gathered, we decided the best environment for our story was a more modern period, mid of S. XIX, the ship would be an exploratory one and it would be in a mission of sailing in unknown latitudes, the spirit of the story was the same, a trip of adventure. so I started searching this new period.

Romanticism began near the end of S. XVIII and its most highlighted painters were Delacroix, Friedrich, Fussli, Francisco de Goya, Gericault, etc. Here some definitions I’ve found about this period:

*It gave great importance to the irrational, romantic paintings often deal with the unconscious, the irrational, the madness and the dreams.

*Delacroix said that romanticism was «the free manifestation of your own personal impressions». Romanticism defends the superiority of the feelings over reason, and thus highlights the sensitivity, the imagination and passions.

*The idea that human beings are not over nature forces contradicts with the ideals from Ancient Greece and Renaissance, where Mankind was over all things and owned its Destiny. This thought lead romantic artists to represent the sublime, churches in ruins, shipwrecks, massacres and madness.

I had found an atractive environment for the story. I kept on researching, learnt about ships more than ever in my life ! Read stories about sailors, watched ancient maps and above all, I learnt a lot about artistic styles. I finally had a well defined setting, an epoque, colours, shapes and the spirit of Romanticism.

(to be continued …)

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Clothing

13 August 2009

Characters change clothes along the movie as it happens with live actors in traditional movies. Designing and modeling costumes is a hard task since there are lots of details involved. Dresses, trousers, shirts, coats, are a few of the items to model.


Main characters wear several costumes depending on if the shot is exterior or interior, if they have suffered injuries or not, if they got wet or they are comfortably dry, etc. In each case a complete remodeling or re-texturing will be necessary.


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