Project
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I'm currently working on my graduation film at ESMA, and I'm excited to share the work I did on our main character, Leo!
I handled the grooming and CFX setup for this and several other characters. Everything was built in Houdini, utilizing the Groombear plugin for parts of the groom.
Shoutout to the amazing team who brought Leo to life:
- Alice Paturel handled Concept Art/Sculpt
- Rémi Perrier handled Body retopology/Body lookdev
- Melvin Quang handled Cloth modeling
- Zoé Schibli handled Cloth texturing
- Nikita Kolos handled Facial retopology / Body & Facial rigging
The Challenge:
Matching Alice's concept art perfectly from every camera angle was a huge silhouette challenge. I initially created a procedural setup to generate guides from the proxy reference, then broke the setup to hand-brush the final details.
Artistically, we aimed for an Illumination Studios style (Despicable Me, The Super Mario Bros. Movie). I focused heavily on referencing their work to strike the perfect balance between stylized hair shapes and realistic lookdev detail.
The CFX simulation was easily the most fun part of the process!
My main goal was to capture our character's dynamic and playful personality through the movement. I built a CFX template to readily accommodate the amazing animations delivered by my team.
The challenge for this character was building a procedural setup that could perfectly match the mustache animation. Because of the mustache's highly angular groom, I needed to create a template that calculated the stretching distance and mapped this data to my blendshapes to ensure a smooth, clean deformation.
I want to thank my friend Nikita for this animation, as well as Rémi, who handled the lighting, rendering, and compositing for this Range of Motion (ROM) shot.