MAKING OF

"Je suis venu te dire que je m'en vais" - Liqueur Brune / Gainsbourg

A music video by Dono et Frenchman

Hello !

Here is a little making of about the music video "Je suis venu te dire que je m'en vais",

sung and played by Liqueur Brune, a new french rock artist, new single from his first record.

This project was made in 5 weeks with blender, we've very enjoyed in making this movie and hope you like it too !

Storyboard

First animatic

Click on the image to see the video

Design by Aurélien Police

Modelisation

Modelisation by Kiopaa

Uvmapping

Click on the image to see the video

Uvmapping by Kiopaa

Animation

Not easy to have a good walkcycle ! Here problems with weighpainting and rig :)

After some hours of work more...

A funny walcycle :)

MAKING of THE SUN
By Sozap

And now let's have a trip deep into the sun and see how it's made :

First we have very nice photo references (that you can see on the animatic).
With that, half of the job was allready done :°D , because sometimes you spend more time finding what you want to do than making it, in this case it was allready there.

That done the next thing to do was to sit down and do nothing, except thinking :
before starting a project, it's always a good thing to list every possibilities that you have to do the effect you want. Think about the pros and the cons, how long it'll take to accomplish... When this part is also done , you have nothing in your blender , but you might be more advanced than the guy who start blending from the beginning.

From that , I decided a few things :
First I will do the color in the compositing, so I can tweak easily colors at the last moment, and also I don’t have to worry about colors in my texturing.

Also, as a star is a very big object, and in the animation we don't turn around, instead of making a complete 3D object, I can make it 2D/3D or a kind of a matte painting. That allows me to do even more cheating.

Here you can see the final object in 3D view.

Finally, I decided to use procedural textures as much as I could, so everything append in blender, and it's non-destructive, at any time I can change any value.
Then I started to look at the references images, to think how I will reproduce the various elements that form the picture of the sun.
So now after that reflection phase, I started a testing phase, that turn out to be the final sun two or three days later.

Here are the differents elements that I've made :
For the « cloudy flames » around the sphere, instead of using particules, I prefered using a simple flat mesh with a bunch of procedurals.

Here is a link to a tutorial that covers this kind of effects, my setup is not exactly the same, I don't use sticky, but the spirit of the thing is here :
http://stblender.iindigo3d.com/tutorials_advancedshockwave.html

For the sphere, I mix various materials in the node editor that each have one fonction :
1st material makes the white spots
the 2nd makes a global gradient on the surface, and has soft edges, that allows to fade with the previous « cloudy flames »
and the 3rd make the psychedelics waves on the surface.

For the flames (the irruptions ones), I used a combo of modifiers on a mesh:
lattice + subsurf + displace + curve, all this is parented to an armature to animate it easily. Then I make a group of it , make an animation of the flame (that is too slow, so you won't notice it in the clip) and then using dupligroup + timeoffset I've put other flames around the sphere.

here is a link to a tutorial that explains the armature + hook + curve trick :
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_Rigging/The_Bones-on-Curve_Spine animation

BSoD , introduction to rigging is a very good starting point if you want to understand and make usefull rigs. And there are other interesting subject in BSoD: animation, lighting, modeling, materials, principles of animation...

At that point everything was ok, there was just a little thing missing, so I added this second and big circle, which has a sphere blend texture , that makes this lighting/ halo effect. And fades nicelly with the « cloudy-flames »

Now it's time to animate:
Every texture was mapped using coordinates of empty objects, here is a very good tutorial that explains this, and If you want to learn more about procedural texturing it's a very good one:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Tutorials/Textures/Wood

So to animate the textures, I've moved the emptys. In fact I've concluded that in this case , the slower it moves the better effect it give, so maybe if you won't pay attention you won't see the texture moving.

About render times :
As I'm using a shadeless material, and there is no raytracing, not so much geometry, the render time is nice. For instance rendering this frame (768x432) on my core 2 duo 6600 took less than 12 seconds. When I add textures and effects, I always check the rendering time, Ideally I want my frames to render between 10s and 1mn. For those who still believe that good result equals long rendering time, I hope that I've demonstrated that it's not always the case.

To conclude :

I hope you've enjoyed reading all this , and also you've learned something, even if I don't show you exactly how to do it, you can see that a complex object is always made of simpler parts. It's always a good thing to mix various little effects instead of having just one big .

That's all, thank you for your attention, and keep blending !!

Sozap