IGA - Petits Bouffeurs

After almost a year, we're back with some new spots for the 2013 IGA Campaign. As usual, here's some Behind-The-Scenes material for the first one of the serie: "Petits Bouffeurs".

Watch the final version right here, so you can enjoy the Behind-The-Scenes post that follows.

IGA Petits bouffeurs

Benoit Therriault, our concept and storyboard artist, always get into production before we do. And, not surprising from him, he created an awesome storyboard and 2d animatic. We prepared a little quad view video showing the 2D Animatic (top left), the 3D animatic (top right), the final animation (bottom left) and the Final delivered spot (bottom right).

IGA Petits Bouffeurs :: Making Of

Here's a few work in progress drawings/renders for the main characters in the spot.

Our hair pipeline continued to get streamlined in the last year, stay tuned for the next blogpost for a more in depth explanation of our setup!

And of course the little monsters which were quite a challenge to get right! In fact, it was the biggest challenge of the production. We knew we would have at some point almost fifty of those on screen, so we had to develop a shader that was not too pricy on the render time and at the same time easy to animate since the glow in their belly should be linked to their animation. In the end, the setup is exactly that. The intensity of a light in their belly was linked to an hidden object in the rig that moved between y=0 and y=1. That way, the animator could give personality to each monster with a simple "breathing" curve.

And a little joke we had for one of the shot

And for those interested in Rigging/Character TD, here's a little video Miquel Campos (our character TD) created for you:

Rigging Breakdown IGA Petits bouffeurs from Miquel Campos on Vimeo.

Benoit also took some time to create awesome mood boards to help the client, and the lighting artists, to visualise the final look of the shots. Here is some of those mood board followed by some look dev. for comparaison.

2D Mood Board

Final Render

2D Mood Board

Final Render

2D Mood Board

Shading and lighting dev.

CompWIP

Final Render

2D Mood Board

Shading dev.

Comp WIP with the glowing monster

Final Look - applied on every shot

Final Render

Oh and I give a beer to the first one who can explain this little tribute we placed in the spot :)

Stay tuned for the next ad and its making of, which should be online within the next two weeks! We'll cover other subjects like the layout creation for our render scene, our Hair pipeline and some lighting!

See you then!