Hi, I’m Loïc Bramoullé, an art & film director from France. I’ve been working in game and animation studios in Paris since completing our graduation film at Melies School in 2010. Since 2015 I’ve been working mostly remotely as a freelancer, and in the last 3 years, I’ve been specializing in indie motion capture game cinematics with Blender.
Since I first tested iPhone facial mocap with CC3-based characters. My latest freelance cinematic gig was for the upcoming Mars Attracts game , which was nearly the most viewed trailer at Gamescom on IGN’s channel.
I used AccuRIG for the two first custom characters, CC4 and iClone to mocap the astronaut’s scream with my iPad.
With HellGal I wanted to see how I could push my mocap cinematic pipeline to be as seamless as possible. Essentially merging mocap recording and film editing, to avoid all the time lost rendering individual shots and only seeing the final film at the last moment. The main thing I used for that is the under-exploited Scene Strips in Blender, allowing you to do non-destructive video editing on 3d scene(s), meaning you can select and time your animations to create shots, without actually cutting your animations.
All my mocap clips were imported on a big 5000 frames timeline, and just like in a video editor I edited my final cut from that, in 3d, without rendering these 5000 frames in any way. The big advantage is that when rendering, only my ~1000 final cut frames were considered, versus having to render a huge amount of frames and discarding them in post-edit.
Creatively, my goal was to design a female mashup of the DOOM Guy and Hellboy, set against the backdrop of a BLAME!-inspired ancient structure. This concept had been on my mind for years, and this contest provided the perfect excuse to dedicate as much time as I could. For HellGal’s design, I gathered references on Pinterest and began sketching, focusing on close-ups of her face to refine her character. For the environment, I opted for a rapid workflow, imagining it on the spot and kitbashing directly in Blender while iterating on the shots and animation as I went along.
I usually start with Kevin or Camilla to already have everything setup, realistic features, and wrinkles, but I just have to symmetrize the mesh in CC4. As they are scanned, it’s not ideal to sculpt an entirely new design with these slight symmetry differences. CC4 mesh editing makes it easy to symmetrize the face, then all design sculpt layers in ZBrush or Blender can be perfectly clean, and asymmetry can still be controlled independently with another sculpt layer.
ZBrush Face Tools for Character Creator is really the go to solution to design not only a character’s face, but its expressions and even wrinkles along with it. And that’s key for convincing facial animation, it’s not just about the motion data and design, but the actual custom expressions that really enhance the performance’s believability, instead of being generic and making the character feel more flat.
I worked on the design in a very iterative way, meaning I started with CC4 morphs to start customizing Camilla, then did most of it via FaceTools. Which allowed me to seamlessly preview her design and facial expressivity back in CC4. But I’ve also kept doing slight design variations in Blender while I rendered the various iterations of the full animation. So I could still polish her design while seeing her in the final shots, with the final lighting and cameras.