Set development

Here is some shorts of some of the sets. There is around 10 sets in the movie. Some bigger and more complicated than others. These are all work in progress. Basic blocking and placement.



I personally like to develop the sets purely in 3D, without too many scetches. I think its interresting to work with the 3D space and exploring different angles to shoot, staging, lighting and mood. When working with it in the 3D viewport, instead of 2D, I get a better idea of the opportunitues.

One thing I see in many computer animated movies these days, is the lack of "stuff" in the sets. Often it makes the sets more interresting, when they are full of stuff. Not stuff that draws attention away from the charaters, but stuff that fills up the composition of the picture. One thing I like alot is repeating patterns and many similar insignificant things.

Agency guy cloth development

Here is some screenshots of the cloth-rig.


The pants and the jacket is dynamic. The pants are only controled by the main body and shoes collider, and a constraint at the hip. The jacket is controlled by a inputmesh from the rig, and collissions with the body and pants. The sleeves have no input-mesh attract. The shoes, shirt and tie is rig.

Agency guy update

Heres a render of the agency guy in bind pose. The pants is not completely done here, as they are in one piece, and not finished with different parts of patterns and sewings.


Furthermore I gave him some glasses. The refractions might not be good yet - maybe i would like the glasses to look a little more "strong".

Its rendered in Mental ray. The hair is Shave and Haircut rendered with the puppet Hair shaders. Works very well i must say! There is three lights with soft shadows, which gave quiet a high render time.

Next up is a pose with dynamic solved cloth, a suitcase and a cigarette! :)

Board color

Here is some color scetches. Im a fan of orange/teal color compositions :)

Agency guy shading progress stills

Hi there.

Here is some stills of the agency guy.


Again its shave and haircut rendered with puppet hairTk shaders for mentalray. As you can see, theres no textures etc. and ive got some strange "banding" problems on the big hair surfaces - maybe caused by some shave noise-attributes, that needs reworking.

The hair is rendered out seperately as a pass with the hairshadows in the beauty-pass.

Agency guy modelling progress

Here's a small view of the progress on another character in the movie; the agency guy.

Aniamtion test #1

Here's a test of all the character specifics of the production so far. Especially meant to find a good look for the cloth hair dynamics.

Click the link to see the quicktime .mov:

Animation test link

There's many considerations to be made from this test - especially concerning shading, scale of hair compared to shot, intersections and so on.