Making of Zapping

This is the first short film Ikso Studio has developed. Itґs taken us about 4 months to get it done. It is all self-produced. We have used 3ds max and Vray for almost everything, the postpo was made with aftereffects.

This is the first short film Ikso Studio has developed. It´s taken us about 4 months to get it done. It is all self-produced. We have used 3ds max and Vray for almost everything, the postpo was made with aftereffects. The Idea of this short film was to make something simple, but with nice quality.

Garfield, Pink Panther and of course Pixar movies.

The design of the character was something to fit our logo, which is a small nice dragon. We tried to give the character a little anime style. We wanted the background and the props to have this retro looking, something like Steampunk.

The rigging was made from scratch. As you can see the character is pretty small, and the head and the body are pretty much the same. We also wanted the character to be elastic and deformable. We decided not to use shapes for the face expression, and used bones instead. This gave us really cool control over the face. We also used Ik/Fk switch. The character can be stretched in any way you want to a wide rank, before breaking the geometry. Also it has bendable limbs. The rigger, Aritz, Is really proud of this rig ;)

The texturing is all hand painted.

For lighting we decided not to use global illumination. We replace that with a combination of Dome lighting and Ambient Occlusion. This gave us much more control on the lighting colors. And also it´s easier to use, and have more control on the passes we have rendered. Here is the passes we have used in this project: Beauty pass, Reflection, Refraction, Specular, Raw lighting, Ambient Occlusion, Self-Illumination, Zdepth, Velocity.

With all this layer the post-po work was really hard work. We had to take all this layers and combine them to get the result that you see in the film. It was pretty brain-breaking. A little example of this: The Zdepth was used for the DOF and also for the fog. It was mixed with a solid object to add some blue color to the fog. The ambient occlusion was also mixed with the Raw lighting to make it look smoother. To the self illumination and the specular a glow effect was added in order to add force to the light …

There are two videos so that you can see the rigging work, and another with the pass work.

Ikso Studio was founded in October 2007. We are four guys, we were together in another Studio. And were pretty unhappy with the work done there. This was because they only cared about the money, and not the quality of the job. We were all in disappointment with this situation so we at the end decided to make our own company to satisfy our hunger for the well done job. As you can see we are a very small company, and also very young, but we are willing to make ourselves a little hollow into this cg world. So we hope that you can see some more stuff in the future.