3D development

During the Pre-Production process we ended up with a beautiful design for our characters, something that would let us play with the metaphors and that fitted our purposes. The problem we faced was that everything was beautifully done in 2D but we had no idea how to translate that to 3D.

One of the biggest challenge was the “lava hair” that the characters had. None of us had experience with particles, so one of us dedicate a big part of the Pre-production just making researches and experimenting. We were able to do this because our team was big and efficient enough for managing without a team member.

The process started using Blob mesh in 3Ds Max, but after some trials we realized it was impossible to work with that, essentially because it devours the rendering time and slows down the computer to the point it crashed every time we touched this. I would like to remind we needed a whole crowd with this lava hair, not just one person, so it was unfeasible to continue with it. This was some of the first things we had:

Apart from the technical, there was also the problem of communication, in where everybody had a little different idea of what that hair should look like but there was no an actual agreement about it, and so the material resarch started while still the movement of the particles was still a work in progress, as you can clearly see in the video below.

Here, with Blob mesh totally discarded, Pflow was used for controlling the particles. This was a total challenge as we had never used something like that ever. Of course with this new branch of investigation, more and more possibilities came to us. Here you can see something that finally approached to what we wanted, a total motivational bust.

Now the problem wasn’t the movement or the flow of the particles, was the production.We needed to copy that in more than 80 different files, with more than 3 character in each file, and as we were not sure at all about the Particle Flow and its events hierarchy, we ended up using something slightly different but in the same line: the mix of a Super Spray and a Force Path Follow, inspired by one marvelous tutorial. To someone that actually knows about particles this may look like blasphemy but it worked for us!

For unifying the hair with the rest of the head (as by itself looked like a bubbly ponytail, we did something that we like to call the "swim cap". It is a piece of geometry with an opacity map that "merges" with the particles. Of course with the help of the materials we camouflage the intersections and makes a solid illusion. Here you can see the final stages of it (but we decided it the highlights were not necessary, so in the end we removed them).