|
|
RSS feed subscriptions for all inHouse entries
|
|
Autodesk® 3ds Max®
|
|
Autodesk® Maya®
|
|
Autodesk® Softimage®
|
|
Autodesk® MotionBuilder®
|
|
Autodesk® Mudbox™
|
|
Autodesk® ImageModeler™
|
|
Autodesk® Sketchbook® Pro
|
|
Autodesk® Smoke on Mac®
|
|
AUGI
Autodesk User Group International
|
Software: Autodesk 3ds Max
|
|
|
|
|
Simon Blanc
I grew up in southern France, between the sea and the mountains close to Cannes. It's a pretty cool place, naturally beautiful. I still find a lot of inspiration in that place. I lived in the south of France for the most part of my life, moving a bit farther every time I had to attend a new school... I knew I had to go far from my native place to follow my path. What's fun is that I've always lived in places with sea and mountains. After my last year of school at Supinfocom, I went to Spain to work for six months while waiting for my visa to go to Blur. What I enjoy about working in a different country is meeting people from different places; it's always fun to share the many visions we all have! Before heading to Spain I'd also been in Luxembourg to work for three months. It was the same thing -- I met a lot of people and it was a great experience!
|
|
|
|
|
|
| The Area:
|
|
Salut Simon! Globetrotting from France to Luxembourg to Spain and now having made your stop in California, you are part of the very talented Blur team as Scene Assembler. Can you share with us the kind of work you do as Scene Assembler?
|
| Simon:
|
Hello !!
Well a Scene Assembler is basically ... a bit of everything!
But mainly modeling, texturing, rendering and compositing.
We usually model the environments and props for the movies, some of us who also like to do character modeling are able to do so as well. Each Scene Assembler is texturing his own models, something that I like a lot here. After this step, the "scene assembly" really begins...
We start by "building" the final shots, by assembling the environments, animated characters, props, and other things into the final 3D scene. After that we do the lighting, rendering, and finally the compositing of our shots.
|
| The Area:
|
|
What are some of the projects you have worked on since you started?
|
| Simon:
|
My first project was the Simpsons ride for the Universal Studios Theme Parks, it was a lot of fun, a huge task, and also very interesting because it was my first ride experience :-D
I've also worked on games cinematics like Fable2, Warhammer and... too many projects that I can't talk about!!
|
| The Area:
|
|
Prior to coming to Blur, what did you do?
|
| Simon:
|
I've worked for a short time in Luxembourg on a DVD for children at Studio 352, then I freelanced in France where I did mainly architectural renders, but it was hard to start freelancing with my knowledge at that time.
So I decided to send my demo! Blur answered positively, so we started the visa process to get there. At the same time I went to Spain to work for 6 months with my friend Arnaud Valette, it was a really good experience.
And it was a good way to see if I could easily work in another country.
Finally, the visa was ready and... here I am in California working at Blur!
|
| The Area:
|
|
What is your CG speciality?
|
| Simon:
|
|
I like animation a lot but I always like to spend more time finishing a picture, especially the lighting and compositing... I can spend hours tweaking every detail of an image with pleasure :-D
|
| The Area:
|
|
How long have you been working in 3D?
|
| Simon:
|
Everything started at 17 when I bought a computer to play games... but I quickly started to be interested in the web instead, and especially in creating websites!
Then I think it was in 2004 -- at the end of my Visual Communication studies where I was primarily doing a lot of web design and flash animation, I discovered 3D and that it was going to be a powerful tool to express myself. Since then, I try to push forward all aspects of doing a picture from A to Z!
|
| The Area:
|
Have you always been visually inclined?
|
| Simon:
|
For as long as I can remember, I've always done drawings. I think it started on my first day in school haha and also it was my way to escape the lessons.. until I had the chance to study in art!
I knew I wanted to draw and create, but the media came to me over time... I had nothing else than a pen until I was 17 :-D
|
| The Area:
|
|
The school you went to is amongst the best CG schools in France -- can you tell us about Supinfocom, the enrollment process and your time there?
|
| Simon:
|
Supinfocom is a great school mainly because of the great students you can find there. We were a group of forty working together, sharing and learning while at the same time, the competition pushed everybody to their limits, which was great to have our work pushed to the max!
The selection process is quite difficult, but it's not the worst; they look for people with personal art, who can develop an artistic and technical talent at the same time.
The first year is based on lessons in animation, sculpting, scripting, 3D... and it also consists of doing a personal 1-minute short, which is great because it allows for students to touch every aspect of 3D and see what they like most.
In the second year, we broke off into groups of 2-4 students to realize a 5-minute short.
|
| The Area:
|
|
What apps did they teach there?
|
| Simon:
|
|
Mainly Maya, 3ds Max, Premiere and After Effects.
|
| The Area:
|
|
What projects did you work on there and can you tell us about them?
|
| Simon:
|
Hehe we did "Moutons" with Vivien Cabrol and Arnaud Valette, a huge year of fun at full speed to finish on time!
|
During my first year I also did two tiny shorts, called "Marabulba" and "Nina reve", the first one was the 1min short we had to do for the school. I chose to do it on the adventures of a tiger in a circus and his bad boss, the second was for the birth of my niece, it was great to give birth to her double in 3D just before seeing the original model :D
| The Area:
|
|
Although Moutons was made three years ago, the quality and story still stands on its own to this day. It is smart, hilarious and so original -- where did the idea come to do such a great story and how did you decide on the choice of characters, setting, the look and style?
|
| Simon:
|
The main idea of the story was from my small brain, then Arnaud and Vivien came in the game to share the ideas, and we melted all that with a lot of fun and love for the final result!
Basically the story began with the foam on top of the ocean waves... in France we call that "moutons", sheep in English, because of the visual similarity. The idea was: why wouldn't it be sheep underwater like the ones we got on earth, maybe they are parents, they can have the same way of life but... underwater! This idea was a good base to build an interesting world on, with a lot of fun things to find and add to the story.
|
| The Area:
|
|
How many people worked on this and how long did it take; what was your contribution to the animated short?
|
| Simon:
|
We were three in total.
We all did a lot of designs and concepts -- basically everything on this project came from all three of us; we had to be ok as a group together to put something in the movie.
Since Arnaud did a spectacular job for the concept art on the movie, he was mainly in charge of that part, all his concepts where working perfectly in 3D. When I think about it now, it was impressive for a student to so early on grasp the relation between concept art and 3D.
Vivien for his part quickly calmed us down on the stupid things Arnaud and I wanted to do in the movie ;-D so he was the only one to be able to animate all these shots, with all these animals per shot, with the deadline we had and the quality we wanted. He knew he had a lot of work to do and acted like a professional when we needed somebody to stay cool during the hard times. He learned rigging to create all the rigs in the movie, exclusively with Max features! Vivien is also a great musician, so he jumped in to do the movie music and sound, which is a huge part of the weirdness and fun of the movie!
I did ... kind of the scene assembly on the movie, defining the final look, lighting, compositing and a bit of everything that my friends did.
|
| The Area:
|
|
What apps were used in production?
|
| Simon:
|
3ds Max, Photoshop and After Effects, some plugins...very few things because learning all these software packages at the same time as developing the story was kind of a challenge ;-D...
Sleeping 4 hours a day during 2 years is not always easy haha...
|
| The Area:
|
|
What did you use to create the ocean and how did you make the grass on the seafloor?
|
| Simon:
|
The ocean surface was a basic plane with noise and wave modifiers, but I spent more time on the shader, creating an automatic system to generate foam on top of the waves, a cool bump, etc...
The problem was the view distance, at the time I had to create several passes to be able to render enough ocean!
The grass was done and animated with 3ds Max Hair&Fur, rendered in scanline like all the underwater shots.
|
| The Area:
|
|
How did you do the caustics?
|
| Simon:
|
|
The caustics were simply projected with a spotlight, we created some animated caustics with a simple technique that I can later explain in a making-of -- come back and watch out for it!
|
| The Area:
|
|
What renderer did you use?
|
| Simon:
|
|
The surface shots where rendered with VRay 1.5 if I remember correctly, and the underwater with Max default scanline renderer. I wanted to spend time on the lighting and have fast renders -- if I recall some frames took only 2 minutes to render!
|
| The Area:
|
|
What custom scripting or plugins were used for this production and why is there one sheep swimming upside down, in the 'school of sheep' ;-)
|
| Simon:
|
I can't remember if Vivien used scripts while doing the rigs but we didn't use a lot of extra plugins, we tried to keep it as simple as possible because the school didn't have a lot of plugins at the time.
But I can remember the moment Vivien decided to put this sheep upside down inside one of the master shots of the movie hahaha this joke represents one the best jokes Vivien has put in his animation, he had a lot of fun animating all those sheep!!
By the way, this joke is exactly representative of the humour we wanted to achieve, some cute stuff happening, funny situations, poetic moments, upside-down sheep... this world was offering too many ideas to find to simply fit it within the confines of a "basic action 3D cartoon".
|
| The Area:
|
|
We can all assume that you had to do a lot of research on the undersea world to get all the 'attributes' to show up in your animation. What were the most challenging aspects of making Moutons?
|
| Simon:
|
|
Every one of us had his own challenges! We all started with a lot of photo and video references -- only "live real" references -- we tried to avoid looking at too many stylized references because we wanted to develop our personal universe.
|
| The Area:
|
|
Let's talk about some of the other images in your portfolio – can you tell us about a few of them?
|
| Simon:
|
"Arain" was kind of a test for myself, I did it when I came to Blur. I wanted to create a complex piece, to learn more and push my knowledge of mental ray and the scene assembly work.
|
The crab is also a personal work, just for fun!
Po1 is in fact "Alfredo", a series for Disney that I worked on while in Spain, I did the lighting and compositing on 11 episodes.
| The Area:
|
|
It looks like you like the sea theme :) can you tell us about 'No More Wine'?
|
| Simon:
|
|
You're right, some people have started to ask me why I love the octopuses so much haha ...
|
'No More Wine' came when I was testing ZBrush, I imported the model in Max and started playing with the sss shader, I was so happy with the first results that I decided to push forward and do the entire scene. I'm not used to doing "fan art" really, but I had a special feeling about this one, as I had this little Davy Jones expression in front of me, asking me to "finish" him :-D
Image Description: No More Wine
| The Area:
|
|
What are your sources of inspiration?
|
| Simon:
|
|
Everything! Especially reality; life is a source of studies, there's nothing more interesting then the small details you can find everywhere around you.
|
| The Area:
|
|
Music you listen to while working?
|
| Simon:
|
|
All kinds, good and bad as some people say haha .. no really everything, especially music that can surprise me! It just depends on the mood I want to be in :D ( for instance a good drum&bass+coffee for the deadlines :p) the only music I can't listen to when I work is ... silence! No way to concentrate!
|
| The Area:
|
|
Word is that Blur gets the occasional celebrity visit, like Tom Cruise for example. What would you say is the coolest thing you have experienced so far?
|
| Simon:
|
|
Wow big question! Haha it is surely not meeting Tom Cruise...well I feel lucky to say... my life so far has been a cool experience! Bad sides, good sides -- it's always a good experience to remember :D
|
| The Area:
|
|
Do you have any advice for those who are finishing school?
|
| Simon:
|
|
Well, sleep one month... and GoGoGo!!
|
| The Area:
|
|
Simon, it's been great to be able to talk with you about your work and how you started in the CG industry. We love your Moutons animation and hope to see another great one from you in the near future! :))
|
| Simon:
|
Thank you!! It really was a pleasure to share more about Moutons and the great souvenirs we're gonna keep forever with Arnaud and Vivien from making it!
More and more soon to come, as we plan to work again together one day and find back this special feeling which created... Moutons!
|
|
| Posted by Prakosa on Oct 15, 2009 at 04:37 AM
|
| apa yang selalu anda lihat sampai anda mampu membuat semua ini?
|
|
| Posted by RedCobra on Oct 04, 2009 at 10:47 AM
|
| Wow...love your stuff!!
|
|
| Posted by Leah_J on Sep 29, 2009 at 05:11 AM
|
| cool!
|
|
| Posted by cidi on Aug 27, 2009 at 10:15 AM
|
| Awesome! This gives me more inspirations.
|
|
| Posted by 3darturo_2401 on Aug 21, 2009 at 09:39 PM
|
| this is a sonthing unique ive never seen something like this
|
|
