GRZEGORZ KUKUŚ : Obviously, our primary modeling tool was ZBrush; it has been serving as Platige’s modelers’ primary tool for quite some time now. Basically, the majority of geometries had a displacement. Because of the facial expressions the character meshes were fairly complex, but thanks to ZBrush it was easy to control the huge amount of vertexes when designing blend shapes. We’re most pleased with how the environment turned out, both in terms of mood as well as the realism level. Our goal was to create a location that would resemble a real place, preferably rural Poland in late winter. That look would perfectly fit the slightly Slavic, naturalistic, and dirty visuals of the game. We wanted to stay as far away from exaggeration as we possibly can, especially the kind of exaggeration that pervades contemporary game cinematics and fantasy films. We collected a vast array of references; we also made a few trips to the outskirts of Warsaw with our art director’s camera. Each tree, despite being generated using GrowFX and processed by hand, is based on a real live reference. The “central” oak tree is a specific species of oak that you can find on Polish roadsides; for our purposes we recreated it in minute detail. When it comes to the technological aspect, we decided to employ a brute force approach – a ton of geometries deployed basically by hand and IBL which looks very good in Arnold.
[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/73937517[/vimeo]
IT’S ART : Looks like there’re a lot of new technical tools used for the production of the new trailer, can you speak about your new pipeline? So what are the advantage of the new tools in this trailer ?
GRZEGORZ KUKUŚ : That’s true, we decided to enact major changes before tackling the project. Aside from the normal evolution of the pipeline, one that’s been taking place for years, we decided to switch our primary 3D software and our primary renderer, leaving 3ds Max + V-ray for Maya + Arnold.
Arnold has been with us for a few years now, but this was the first time that we’ve decided to use it in a project of such scale. We encountered some trouble in the beginning and had to push our way through a plethora of bugs and nuances which influenced the overall stability and rendering times, but as the project drew to a close we decided that we were very pleased with the results. In my opinion, the software performed splendidly and we’ll surely be using it in our next projects.
V-ray will probably remain the studio’s primary rendering software for a few years, because it works very well in smaller, less complex projects; however, in the case of big projects and complex scenes with hundreds of elements, both the GI quality as well as the speed is better when using Arnold.
We’ve also used ZBrush’s new hairstyling abilities, which, after exporting to Maya, considerably shortened the time it takes to build a base hairstyle. When we combined it with Yeti, we managed get very good results in a very short timeframe. Additionally, Yeti works very well with Arnold and each additional reference develops splendidly. In the vast majority of projects, hair, especially long and animated, pose a significant challenge for the entire production process. This time around, however, we barely felt any stoppages or slowdowns despite the fact that all of the characters have either hair or facial hair.
Aside from Yeti, we’ve used a few of our own proprietary, in-house scripts to simulate the hair. These scripts of ours turned out to perform very well, too, despite the fact that it was the first time they were deployed in a project of such scale.
[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/73937591[/vimeo]
We’ve been using Houdini in more and more projects with each passing year. In this project, we’ve used to it render and simulate the hair on the horses. Further down the road we’re planning on using it for cloth simulations currently done in Maya supported by Max and our own in-house tools. The frequency of Houdini’s use in special effects and other Platige projects is also on the rise.
IT’S ART Can you speak of the different parts of the production, skin, cloths, hairs? What was the hardest part to work on? Why?
GRZEGORZ KUKUŚ : Retaining full control over the huge amount of material was surely the hardest thing about this project. We had eight characters, realistically animated horses, multilayered simulated clothing, hair, displacement, tons of geometry, close-ups, complex choreography. It’s hard to pick a single element that was especially difficult – given the short running time, the amount of elements was giving us most trouble. The fight sequence proved difficult – it’s a single, 700-frame-long shot, with the camera going from close-ups to long shots, featuring multiple characters and a huge amount of geometries. Despite the fact that we have quite the powerful rendering farm at Platige, the rendering of the environment alone for this scene took a few dozen hours.
IT’S ART : How much time have you spent working on this cinematic? Can you give us some details about the production timeframe? Or the number of people on the team?
GRZEGORZ KUKUŚ : Preproduction took about two months, the work proper took four months. The trailer was ready in June, and we spent the next few weeks on last minute changes and tweaks. The core team consisted of over a dozen people; after including people tasked with specific, individual jobs and freelancers, the number of graphic artists mentioned in the credits nearly reached 50.
IT’S ART : Why would you define your production as a piece of art?
TOMEK BAGIŃSKI : I’m just a director, not an art scholar. I’ve no idea what is and what is not a piece of art. It’s not my job to decide that. I’ll leave the theory to the critics, scholars, and students. It is not the answer you’d expect but I really left the discussions about art behind me long time ago.
IT’S ART : What’s your own definition of art?
TOMEK BAGIŃSKI : I don’t have one. In my opinion, art is impossible to define. I’m focused on creation and not on talking about creation. There are people much better suited for that kind of discussion than I am. Even on the team of “The Witcher”. The director’s job involves a combination of creativity, management, and politics. There is not much room there for art theory.
Platige Image Official Website
Many thanks to everyone at Platige that makes it possible including, Ola Watras, Olga Cyganiak, Sebastian Kalemba, TOMEK BAGIŃSKI and GRZEGORZ KUKUŚ
