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Check out the first V-Ray Editor's Choice selected by Chaos Groups and CG Record - LAGUNA COLORADA this is full CGI Short-film done by Richard TATESSIAN and some friend using 3dsMax, V-ray, PhoenixFD, Zbrush, Megascan, MultiScatter, Nuke, After-effect and Resolve. We had pleasure to interview with Richard TATESSIAN
Please introduce abit about yourself and tell us about your LAGUNA COLORADA - full CGI Short film. What is the first Idea and how you come- up with the idea.
Hello, my name is Richard Tatessian, I live in Paris and I’ve been working as a 3D artist generalist for 10 years. I’ve worked in several fields including advertising, architecture, pharmaceutical, luxury and cars. I’ve worked as a modelling/material supervisor at PSA for 4 years. I also do a lot of personal projects on the side such as 3D illustrations, some videos, and occasionally 3D printed jewelry. For me, personal projects are tremendous tools to learn lots of new things and having fun at the same time! You can check them on my Artstation, Vimeo, Instagram or Facebook pages: "Richard TATESSIAN 3D". In there you can also find my WIPs but also a technological watch, softwares, scripts and videos that I like.
These experiences led me to work with those behind the concept of LAGUNA COLORADA: Christophe Huet and his team at Asile Paris as well as the photographer Roberto Badin.The idea was to make a full CGI video of a car in a familiar and natural environment yet not too complex. This is how I joined them for the directing and entered the production phase.
How long does it take you to produce the film. Only you work on the film or have another artist to help you?
This kind of internal project can be very long and complex to produce all the more when you are also juggling with client projects. Quite often, due to lack of time, teams don’t have the time to go through the completion of a project, settle for less ambitious things or even leave the project on the side for months. Asile’s goal was to hire an artist from outside the studio to be working full time on the film and, if there was some availability in the teams’ schedule, they could come give the artist a hand. As such, I’ve worked full time on this project for about 5 months. Denis Seounes and Ivan Rose helped me for pre prod, lookdev lighting and some materials for about 1 to 2 weeks. Christophe and Roberto assisted me for the direction and graphic style throughout the project.
Please explain the CG technic that help you made a film.
- First and foremost, you lay down the basis on paper and gather references. Laguna Colorada is located in Bolivia. Since the budget wouldn’t allow me to go there, Google was my best friend!
- I started with the environment as a whole and quickly set up a modular road in case I had to make any change to it. I quickly did some animation tests with the car, to see how it was supposed to behave, which speed it needed to have, etc...
- Cameras evolved throughout the project. Since the scene always took place on the same road, I chose to only have one Max file with all the shots in it. It was much easier to control everything in just one scene.
- As far as lighting is concerned, an HDRI was selected though we wanted to have the option to modify its orientation between each shot in order to enhance the aesthetic of the car. For this kind of scene it doesn’t really matter if the sun switches position between shots. For that purpose, I’ve created a layer for each shot with a dupplicate of the HDRI in each. Even though we get as many HDRI as there are plans, in the end it doesn’t really matter as only the current shot’s layer is toggled on with the corresponding HDRI correctly set.
-Then comes the time for the first still renders followed by videos rendered with low settings using V-Ray progressive rendering. The final renders were saved in .exr. Depth of field and motion blur were calculated directly within the render. It’s longer but gives a better results.
- Typical compositing done in Nuke. I mainly do color grading, adding warm/cold tones and playing with contrast.
-I usually use After Effects for color grading, editing, backplates integration and sound. It’s not really meant for that but it allows me to keep everything in one software and not switch all the time. This time I also used Resolve, recommended by Christophe, and I have to say it looks pretty neat! It seems to be very reactive!
Why did you chose V-Ray for your film. What you love most from V-ray?
I’ve chosen V-Ray mainly because it was the renderer I was most familiar with. Whether it is large visuals or videos, it perfectly suits my needs. I saw it evolve over the years and it only keeps getting better! Rendering times are always shorter. Placing lights become easier with IPR. I can’t wait to see its future updates!
Please tell us about how you create the Car (Rigging, animating, shading and rendering)?
- When starting the project, the choice of the car to use, albeit important, wasn’t that essential. The focus of the film was to depict an adventure, a journey. There are tons of models that can be bought online and as such we had lots of choice. However we still wanted it to be a SUV which would better fit the environment style.
- After the initial road setup, I started doing some animation tests. It’s by far the field I am least at ease with. It was the first time I animated a car. I modelled a rough low poly version of it that I placed in the environment as an Xref that I then rigged with Madcar. Results were quickly obtained but I had lots of troubles to have it keep a constant speed. It was very important for me to know how far the car would go to only model what was necessary for the landscape. Another difficulty that arose was the fact that when very close to the car, it was very visible that it was slightly shaking. I had troubles fixing that issue. The first attempts made it look like there was an earthquake happening!
- As far as carpaint goes, I used a VrayBlend material for it. Several layers of the material had to be stacked just like for the real thing: raw metal, a layer for paint, a layer for flakes, a layer for coating.
How about CGI Environment? can you breakdown some technic.
The environment was a big challenge for me as I had never done such a large landscape before. Once again, the Laguna Colorada is an existing landscape, so it had to be reproduced in its entirity with its correct scale. The lake is roughly 10km wide and the volcano and surrounding mountains also had to be visible.
- I started by taking a lots of screenshots on Google Earth of the lake and its surroundings. It is possible to retrieve pictures that are almost 5k. Once all these pictures were merged into one, I found myself with a giant image of 60 000 pixels wide. Obviously, such a large size is useless but I had everything needed to create masks and landmarks. Same thing happened for the displace. I found a site that displayed greyscale topography. I took screenshots of the lake and its area then merged everything together. I then needed to generate the displace on a subdivised plane, finding the correct height of the volcano on the net and scale it all accordingly. Tada! That’s how a 3000 km2 terrain got created. The previously generated diffuse allowed to add some details on the displace. Once I had an interesting overall terrain, I sliced the 3D model in several parts. They were made into areas depending on how close or far they were from the road in order to be able to adjust separately the various settings for displace, texture size, scattering and parts to sculpt in zbrush to give them a little more diversity...
-Material wise, I was able to play a bit with Megascan! It is really awesome but I wish I had tested more things with it! I mainly retrieved some nice scans of rocks. I really liked what Quixel did with it and I sure plan on getting back to it one day!
-To complete the picture, Multiscatter helped me adding some diversity to the landscape with moss, rocks and grass.
Could you please tell abit about Compositing. V-Ray Element help you much in Compositing?
Vray Elements helped me obviously. They allowed me to adjust contrast or some hues for some elements even though I always try to be the closest possible of the final result in my raw renders. I think it’s high time I tried Cryptomatte instead!
-On the Nuke side, nothing exceptional. I am not an expert but I know enough to obtain what I want. I enjoy adding several color layers to intensify the warm and cold tones of the image and to avoid the pixels to be completely black or overbright. Once exported, I do the color grading, the flares and the smoke/dust backplates in After Effects.
-The final touch, editing and sound design were done in Resolve. It was the first time I used that software and it was friggin awesome! It runs fast!
Overall What is difficult and what is important for Automotive CGI film like this? Any Tips?
It is easy to think that only 45 seconds for a video is not going to be such a huge task especially since there is only one environment but that’s not the case. You have to think about all the aspects of the film and lay the foundations on paper before jumping too quickly in the 3d production. It’s a mistake I’ve done all too often and that I still sometimes do... Take the time to search and study your references! It is also very important to understand how to enhance a car through its materials and lighting to highlight its design curves.
Do you have any advice for artist who want to create personal CGI short film?
Even if the results is not the one you had in mind, you deserve credit for having started a project! It is never easy to do personal projects and even less completing them. It is better to lower the scope of a project and complete it than the opposite. Other pieces of advice would be to prepare yourself correctly, give yourself small personal challenges and more than anything else have fun!
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Clik here to view.
Check out the first V-Ray Editor's Choice selected by Chaos Groups and CG Record - LAGUNA COLORADA this is full CGI Short-film done by Richard TATESSIAN and some friend using 3dsMax, V-ray, PhoenixFD, Zbrush, Megascan, MultiScatter, Nuke, After-effect and Resolve. We had pleasure to interview with Richard TATESSIAN
Please introduce abit about yourself and tell us about your LAGUNA COLORADA - full CGI Short film. What is the first Idea and how you come- up with the idea.
Hello, my name is Richard Tatessian, I live in Paris and I’ve been working as a 3D artist generalist for 10 years. I’ve worked in several fields including advertising, architecture, pharmaceutical, luxury and cars. I’ve worked as a modelling/material supervisor at PSA for 4 years. I also do a lot of personal projects on the side such as 3D illustrations, some videos, and occasionally 3D printed jewelry. For me, personal projects are tremendous tools to learn lots of new things and having fun at the same time! You can check them on my Artstation, Vimeo, Instagram or Facebook pages: "Richard TATESSIAN 3D". In there you can also find my WIPs but also a technological watch, softwares, scripts and videos that I like.
These experiences led me to work with those behind the concept of LAGUNA COLORADA: Christophe Huet and his team at Asile Paris as well as the photographer Roberto Badin.The idea was to make a full CGI video of a car in a familiar and natural environment yet not too complex. This is how I joined them for the directing and entered the production phase.
How long does it take you to produce the film. Only you work on the film or have another artist to help you?
This kind of internal project can be very long and complex to produce all the more when you are also juggling with client projects. Quite often, due to lack of time, teams don’t have the time to go through the completion of a project, settle for less ambitious things or even leave the project on the side for months. Asile’s goal was to hire an artist from outside the studio to be working full time on the film and, if there was some availability in the teams’ schedule, they could come give the artist a hand. As such, I’ve worked full time on this project for about 5 months. Denis Seounes and Ivan Rose helped me for pre prod, lookdev lighting and some materials for about 1 to 2 weeks. Christophe and Roberto assisted me for the direction and graphic style throughout the project.
Please explain the CG technic that help you made a film.
- First and foremost, you lay down the basis on paper and gather references. Laguna Colorada is located in Bolivia. Since the budget wouldn’t allow me to go there, Google was my best friend!
- I started with the environment as a whole and quickly set up a modular road in case I had to make any change to it. I quickly did some animation tests with the car, to see how it was supposed to behave, which speed it needed to have, etc...
- Cameras evolved throughout the project. Since the scene always took place on the same road, I chose to only have one Max file with all the shots in it. It was much easier to control everything in just one scene.
- As far as lighting is concerned, an HDRI was selected though we wanted to have the option to modify its orientation between each shot in order to enhance the aesthetic of the car. For this kind of scene it doesn’t really matter if the sun switches position between shots. For that purpose, I’ve created a layer for each shot with a dupplicate of the HDRI in each. Even though we get as many HDRI as there are plans, in the end it doesn’t really matter as only the current shot’s layer is toggled on with the corresponding HDRI correctly set.
-Then comes the time for the first still renders followed by videos rendered with low settings using V-Ray progressive rendering. The final renders were saved in .exr. Depth of field and motion blur were calculated directly within the render. It’s longer but gives a better results.
- Typical compositing done in Nuke. I mainly do color grading, adding warm/cold tones and playing with contrast.
-I usually use After Effects for color grading, editing, backplates integration and sound. It’s not really meant for that but it allows me to keep everything in one software and not switch all the time. This time I also used Resolve, recommended by Christophe, and I have to say it looks pretty neat! It seems to be very reactive!
Why did you chose V-Ray for your film. What you love most from V-ray?
I’ve chosen V-Ray mainly because it was the renderer I was most familiar with. Whether it is large visuals or videos, it perfectly suits my needs. I saw it evolve over the years and it only keeps getting better! Rendering times are always shorter. Placing lights become easier with IPR. I can’t wait to see its future updates!
Please tell us about how you create the Car (Rigging, animating, shading and rendering)?
- When starting the project, the choice of the car to use, albeit important, wasn’t that essential. The focus of the film was to depict an adventure, a journey. There are tons of models that can be bought online and as such we had lots of choice. However we still wanted it to be a SUV which would better fit the environment style.
- After the initial road setup, I started doing some animation tests. It’s by far the field I am least at ease with. It was the first time I animated a car. I modelled a rough low poly version of it that I placed in the environment as an Xref that I then rigged with Madcar. Results were quickly obtained but I had lots of troubles to have it keep a constant speed. It was very important for me to know how far the car would go to only model what was necessary for the landscape. Another difficulty that arose was the fact that when very close to the car, it was very visible that it was slightly shaking. I had troubles fixing that issue. The first attempts made it look like there was an earthquake happening!
- As far as carpaint goes, I used a VrayBlend material for it. Several layers of the material had to be stacked just like for the real thing: raw metal, a layer for paint, a layer for flakes, a layer for coating.
How about CGI Environment? can you breakdown some technic.
The environment was a big challenge for me as I had never done such a large landscape before. Once again, the Laguna Colorada is an existing landscape, so it had to be reproduced in its entirity with its correct scale. The lake is roughly 10km wide and the volcano and surrounding mountains also had to be visible.
- I started by taking a lots of screenshots on Google Earth of the lake and its surroundings. It is possible to retrieve pictures that are almost 5k. Once all these pictures were merged into one, I found myself with a giant image of 60 000 pixels wide. Obviously, such a large size is useless but I had everything needed to create masks and landmarks. Same thing happened for the displace. I found a site that displayed greyscale topography. I took screenshots of the lake and its area then merged everything together. I then needed to generate the displace on a subdivised plane, finding the correct height of the volcano on the net and scale it all accordingly. Tada! That’s how a 3000 km2 terrain got created. The previously generated diffuse allowed to add some details on the displace. Once I had an interesting overall terrain, I sliced the 3D model in several parts. They were made into areas depending on how close or far they were from the road in order to be able to adjust separately the various settings for displace, texture size, scattering and parts to sculpt in zbrush to give them a little more diversity...
-Material wise, I was able to play a bit with Megascan! It is really awesome but I wish I had tested more things with it! I mainly retrieved some nice scans of rocks. I really liked what Quixel did with it and I sure plan on getting back to it one day!
-To complete the picture, Multiscatter helped me adding some diversity to the landscape with moss, rocks and grass.
Could you please tell abit about Compositing. V-Ray Element help you much in Compositing?
Vray Elements helped me obviously. They allowed me to adjust contrast or some hues for some elements even though I always try to be the closest possible of the final result in my raw renders. I think it’s high time I tried Cryptomatte instead!
-On the Nuke side, nothing exceptional. I am not an expert but I know enough to obtain what I want. I enjoy adding several color layers to intensify the warm and cold tones of the image and to avoid the pixels to be completely black or overbright. Once exported, I do the color grading, the flares and the smoke/dust backplates in After Effects.
-The final touch, editing and sound design were done in Resolve. It was the first time I used that software and it was friggin awesome! It runs fast!
Overall What is difficult and what is important for Automotive CGI film like this? Any Tips?
It is easy to think that only 45 seconds for a video is not going to be such a huge task especially since there is only one environment but that’s not the case. You have to think about all the aspects of the film and lay the foundations on paper before jumping too quickly in the 3d production. It’s a mistake I’ve done all too often and that I still sometimes do... Take the time to search and study your references! It is also very important to understand how to enhance a car through its materials and lighting to highlight its design curves.
Do you have any advice for artist who want to create personal CGI short film?
Even if the results is not the one you had in mind, you deserve credit for having started a project! It is never easy to do personal projects and even less completing them. It is better to lower the scope of a project and complete it than the opposite. Other pieces of advice would be to prepare yourself correctly, give yourself small personal challenges and more than anything else have fun!
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