Studio Pipeline from Maya to Blender on LilWild
Bintang S Pratama writes:
Hello Everyone!
Happy to announce that our studio ( Infinite Studios located in Batam, Indonesia ) was adopting Blender on our surfacing and lighting department beside our other choice of renderer like Vray, Redshift, and Arnold which working in Maya and Houdini. We actually use Blender since 2.80 was out, back then we decided to use Eevee as renderer ( I know that Eevee was super experimental and kind of limited compare to now ), but it still works great.
Now we use Cycles in this animation series project called LilWild own by Mediacorp, Singapore. A story about a little elephant with her friends in a zoo. It was quite fun to work with.
The workflow also quite interesting, we create our own tools to make it easy for artist to build their lighting file, in a nutshell the flow is like this :Asset :
- Maya >> Geo and Rig >> Publish as Alembic
- Blender >> Geo and Surface >> Grab the Alembic and start surface >> Publish as Blend
Shot :
- Maya >> Layout, Animation and FX >> Export as Alembic
- Blender >> Build lighting file and do Lighting Render
- Nuke >> Render as exrs multilayter and do Compositing
As a studio, we are always try to improve our toolset for artist, Unreal is on going, and I wish USD will become more common for Blender in the near future :)
Below you’ll see one of the music video grabbed from some clips on the series.
I hope you like it, Happy Blending Everyone!
Bintang
Hi,
That looks great, and really nice to see work coming out of Indonesia. :)
If you have the time at some point, it might be interesting to see a video on your workflows, as a lot of people are in the same process.
cheers for posting this!
rob
Hi Rob,
Thank you for coming here! I might consider sharing it later in the future, but the idea is in the lighting file we linked each asset to blender scene, and then do a make local operations for all objects ( but not data, not material, and yes even better we can do a lib override now, but this project before library override was complete ).
After linking all the assets to the scene and make it local, we aslo make local the mesh sequence cache modifier filepath and then assign the shot alembic for each corresponding asset.
Please note that the asset need to have mesh sequence modifier on each mesh object ( but excl. empty ) and a transform cache modifier on every object including empty object before they were linked to the lighting scene.
This is quite a simplified version of what is going on, but I hope this can be useful for now.
Cheers!