The Making Of
Characters
EMILY
Emily is our lead character. She’s facing her emotions and memories during the entire movie.
She is a dynamic and full of life young woman with a great life force. The marks on her skin testify to the violence of her accident, against which she is constantly fighting.
She has a very strong relationship with her father, who has always been at her side despite difficult times.
DAD
Emily's father is a gruffy man but also kind hearted.
He's the one who made the music box for his daughter.
He goes to his daughter's bedside every day, waiting for her to wake up one day or at least give her a sign of life.
Concept
We worked from different references, for the faces of our characters, the corpulence while trying to respect the artistic direction we had established.
To sculpt our characters, we used the ZBrush software. The big challenge was to keep an anatomy that would remain faithful to our DA while using our concepts. We didn't want to lose the essence of either. We also made our blendshapes in Zbrush, using a morpher to sculpt Emily’s one and apply the same on the father. Later we adjust it to the father because he doesn’t have the same anatomy.
Images texturing
For the texturing we started with a realistic base by projecting textures on MARI. Then, we repainted them completely on Zbrush, which was easier for us because this software gave us the possibility to paint directly on our characters, without having to worry about the different UDIMs.
So we took advantage of the opportunity to stick more to the Art Direction we had chosen, which was more in the spirit of 2D painting.
Finally we switched to photoshop because there was a loss of quality on zbrush.
Some painting accidents, or some painting effects were also added during this step.
Props
Calidou
Calidou is the first Cuddlytoy Emily received as a child, it is also one of her fondest memories.
For the concept the challenge was we wanted it to appear very large so we had to find a cute and a comforting design to not make this scene creepy.
We used ornatrix to have a base to be able to repaint over it, then we proceeded to Camera Mapping to project the painted texture on the mesh. Finally we used Tyflow to simulate some hair.
Music Box
The Music Box is a birthday gift Emily’s dad made for her. We really wanted to depict the dad’s gruffy personality through this object. That’s why we chose a raw look for the sculpt, and kept strokes visible in the wood. But we didn’t want it to look too stiff, so we used organic shapes.
The dancer was sculpted in Zbrush, but for the box itself, we chose a more procedural approach using Houdini to create the displacement.
background
Animation
We animated on a motion capture, mainly for the walks to gain some time, wich we didn’t hesitate to modify or erase in order to obtain what we wanted.
Moreover the face and the hands hadn’t any motion capture, we animated them in keyframes with subtility and realism for convey the emotions of our characters.
Meanwhile the father is only on keyframes and hadn’t any motion capture