Recent News - Kenau

I didn't have time to write during the last couple of mouths. It was quite tricky to manage my time. After all our project in the studio where I work was finished.
Kenau is historical film take place at the time of Dutch War of Independence. So at Digital Apes we handled around 300 VFX shots. There were different type effects we did. Mainly set extensions, cg cityscapes, matte paints, clean ups. There were shots we had to add arrows (usually storm of arrows), blood on swords and on amours, fire, smoke, etc. And there were more complex shots where we add a lot of elements like crowd, explosions, demolitions. And last but not least there was the opening full cg shot which was around 1000 frame long and we had to create a cg Great Black-backed Gull and a complete cg aerial view of the city of Haarlem at the time 16th century.
Personally I was glad to work on a movie what makes sense for me. We didn't have to make giant robots or dragons or demolish whole cities. As I wrote before I like movies where the VFX don't lead the story but support it. Kenau is like that. I can't wait to see it in theater.
I was involved just a couple of VFX heavy shots directly. But I supported the whole 3D crew with technical and pipeline stuff as well.
First of all I made the animatic for the opening shot. After we had to clarify our asset pipeline. Basically it meant we had to establish a naming convention for textures, shaders and Arnold StandIns. I wrote dozens of python functions to make it simple but it turned out the issue is more complex so I didn't have time to make a tool what every 3D guy could use. The next pipeline issue was the camera. The idea was that we should use Alembic camera so all the nuke and maya users would use the same asset for their shots.
My biggest challenge was to create the rig and the animation of the seagull. It took around two month. I can't say it could not be better but I like the result very much. I'm biased :) If I have time I will write a whole post about the seagull rig. To summarize I can write only common places: to have good animation, and anatomy references was crucial. Of course we could download a lot of pictures from the net but it was almost impossible to get a good quality footage about a Great Black-backed Gull flying as the camera followed it. The other problematic thing was the skeleton. I found a lot pictures about a bird skeleton but not seagull. We talked about in the studio we should catch a real seagull and did the research for ourselves (if you know what I mean).
Other major challenges were the demolition, explosion scenes. There were 4 large scale explosion in the movie I had to create. I create maya fluid effects and particle and nCloth simulations. I have lot of things to write about this topic so I'm going to continue it (soon)...