Over the weekend I worked a bit on my Crysis mod “Ghost of a Tale”. I’ve been mostly creating textures and materials, and I feel I’m barely starting to get the hang of it. This is all very temporary but I’m having fun! Anyway, here’s a screenshot to give you an idea of the progress (with a torch flame hovering in mid-air!)…
Here’s a little tutorial about creating a texture with parallax mapping for the Crysis engine. This is the effect that makes the textures feel like they’re in relief and you could almost touch them! I first saw that effect in “The Elders Scrolls: Oblivion” and was blown away by the level of realism it does add to what are essentially flat polygons. So enjoy!
I’m done with the teaser of the movie! Woohoo! 😀
It took me a long time as I had to learn much about the whole process. I was already familiar with animation of course, and I knew a bit about modeling and rigging, but I had to work hard to learn about surfacing, lighting and compositing. Well, at least the basics so I could develop a mini-pipeline to take the shots from 2d drawings to 3d animatic to final compositing without too much hassle. And boy was that hard! But it is definitely rewarding to see the scenes and characters coming to “life” which were for almost two years simple figments of my imagination…
The teaser is very short and the music is only a temp track. The real soundtrack you’ll hear in the movie is a beautiful choral piece composed by the very talented Thomas Hjort Jensen.
(Also, at the end it says “2009”, but I’m afraid it’s only wishful thinking!)
In other unrelated big news, I’m happy to announce that I’ll be directing the animation of a movie being produced by Universal in a French studio called Mac Guff Line (located in Paris). So I’ll be moving back to France in the month of January. Exciting times! 
I’ve just made a major update to poseLib (version 4.4.0). The biggest addition probably being the long awaited support for Macs (and OSX). A big thanks goes to Ludo for taking the time to thoroughly test it!
Also, I’ve decided to switch poseLib from a freeware model to a honor-based system (basically a donation principle). It means that people who use and like poseLib can make a donation to help the development and express their satisfaction with the tool. But I didn’t want to turn it into a plugin with DRM and thus force users to buy it. As I said, it’s “honor-based”; you do what you choose to…
Here is a screenshot of a Crysis mod I’m working on (when I have time, of course). Again, I have to say that the CryEngine 2 is very impressive indeed. It allows you to fine tune the shaders and the lighting to a degree of precision that is unprecedented in the domain of video-games. And since I’m using MayaCGF, I just have to click one button to send the model from Maya to Sandbox 2 (the Crysis editor). And if I update the model in Maya, I just click the refresh button in the editor and the updated model is instantly reloaded. I’m loving it!!
I’ve recently moved the first couple of shots through the whole pipeline, from animatic to “final” compositing stage. Of course, as on any movie, I’m sure I’ll tweak the shots before the production is over though, just to upgrade them to a higher level of quality. Anyway, it’s really rewarding! Yay! 😀
Oh, and a good friend of mine named Fabrice Joubert just finished his short movie called French Roast. Congrats to him and the crew! Try and catch it in festivals, it’s all good!
I’ve just started my wonderful adventures in render-land, and I’ve recently had to setup a (very small) render farm. After having experienced difficulties finding information online for doing so, I wrote a few simple tips about setting up a couple of machines for the purpose of network rendering with Mental Ray and Maya. This is fairly technical stuff, but who knows, maybe some of you will find that useful…
