Chaos Editor's Choice | LAGUNA COLORADA - full CGI Short-film by Richard TATESSIAN

Check out the first V-Ray Editor's Choice selected by Chaos Group and CG Record. LAGUNA COLORADA is a full-CGI short film created by ...

Check out the first V-Ray Editor's Choice selected by Chaos Group and CG Record. LAGUNA COLORADA is a full-CGI short film created by Richard TATESSIAN and friends using 3ds Max, V-Ray, Phoenix FD, ZBrush, Megascans, MultiScatter, Nuke, After Effects and Resolve. We had the pleasure to interview Richard TATESSIAN.
Please tell us a bit about yourself and about your LAGUNA COLORADA full-CGI short film. What was the initial idea and how did you come up with it?.

Hello, my name is Richard Tatessian, I live in Paris and I’ve been working as a 3D artist generalist for 10 years. I’ve worked in several fields including advertising, architecture, pharmaceutical, luxury and cars. I’ve worked as a modelling/material supervisor at PSA for 4 years. I also do a lot of personal projects on the side such as 3D illustrations, some videos, and occasionally 3D-printed jewelry. For me, personal projects are tremendous tools to learn lots of new things and have fun at the same time! You can check them on my ArtStation, Vimeo, Instagram or Facebook pages: "Richard TATESSIAN 3D". There, you can also find my WIPs as well as a technological watch, software, scripts, and videos that I like.


These experiences led me to work with the following behind the concept of LAGUNA COLORADA: Christophe Huet and his team at Asile Paris, as well as the photographer Roberto Badin. The idea was to make a full-CGI video of a car in a familiar and natural environment, yet not too complex. This is how I joined them for the directing and entered the production phase.



How long did it take you to produce the film? Was it only you working on the film or were there other artists helping?

This kind of internal project can be very long and complex to produce — and all the more so when you are also juggling with client projects. Quite often, due to lack of time, teams don’t have the time to go through the completion of a project; they’ll settle for less-ambitious things or even leave the project on the side for months. Asile’s goal was to hire an artist from outside the studio to be working full time on the film and, if there was some availability in the teams’ schedule, they could come to give the artist a hand. As such, I worked full time on this project for about 5 months. Denis Seounes and Ivan Rose helped me for pre-prod, look-dev lighting, and some materials for about 1 to 2 weeks. Christophe and Roberto assisted me with the direction and graphic style throughout the project.


Please explain the CG techniques that helped you make the film.
First and foremost, you lay down the basics on paper and gather references. Laguna Colorada is located in Bolivia. Since the budget wouldn’t allow me to go there, Google was my best friend!


I started with the environment as a whole and quickly set up a modular road in case I had to make any changes to it. I quickly did some animation tests with the car to see how it was supposed to behave, which speed it needed to have, etc.


Cameras evolved throughout the project. Since the scene always took place on the same road, I chose to only have one Max file with all the shots in it. It was much easier to control everything in just one scene.


As far as lighting is concerned, an HDRI was selected, though we wanted to have the option to modify its orientation between each shot in order to enhance the aesthetic of the car. For this kind of scene, it doesn’t really matter if the sun switches position between shots. For that purpose, I created a layer for each shot with a duplicate of the HDRI in each. Even though we get as many HDRI as there are planes, in the end, it doesn’t really matter as only the current shot’s layer is toggled on with the corresponding HDRI correctly set.


Then comes the time for the first still renders followed by videos rendered with low settings using V-Ray Progressive Rendering. The final renders were saved in .exr. Depth of field and motion blur were calculated directly within the render. It’s longer but gives a better result.


Typical compositing was done in Nuke. I mainly do color grading, adding warm/cold tones and play with the contrast.


I usually use After Effects for color grading, editing, backplates integration, and sound. It’s not really meant for that but it allows me to keep everything in one software and not switch all the time. This time I also used Resolve, recommended by Christophe, and I have to say it looks pretty neat! It seems to be very reactive!
Why did you choose V-Ray for your film? What do you love most about V-Ray?

I’ve chosen V-Ray mainly because it was the renderer I was most familiar with. Whether it is large visuals or videos, it perfectly suits my needs. I saw it evolve over the years and it only keeps getting better! Rendering times are always shorter. Placing lights become easier with IPR. I can’t wait to see future updates!

Please tell us about how you created the car (rigging, animating, shading and rendering)?

When starting the project, the choice of the car to use, albeit important, wasn’t that essential. The focus of the film was to depict an adventure; a journey. There are tons of models that can be bought online and, as such, we had lots of choices. However, we still wanted it to be an SUV that would better fit the environment style.


After the initial road setup, I started doing some animation tests. It’s by far the field I am least at ease with. It was the first time I animated a car. I modelled a rough low-poly version of it that I placed in the environment as an XRef that I then rigged with MadCar. Results were quickly obtained but I had lots of trouble getting it to keep a constant speed. It was very important for me to know how far the car would go to only model what was necessary for the landscape. Another difficulty that arose was the fact that when the camera is very close to the car, it was very visible that it was slightly shaking. I had trouble fixing that issue. The first attempts made it look like there was an earthquake happening!


As far as car paint goes, I used a VRayBlendMtl for it. Several layers of the material had to be stacked just like for the real thing: raw metal, a layer for paint, a layer for flakes, a layer for coating.
How about the CGI environment? Can you break down your techniques?

TThe environment was a big challenge for me as I had never done such a large landscape before. Once again, the Laguna Colorada is an existing landscape, so it had to be reproduced in its entirety with its correct scale. The lake is roughly 10km wide and the volcano and surrounding mountains also had to be visible.


I started by taking lots of screenshots on Google Earth of the lake and its surroundings. It is possible to retrieve pictures that are almost 5k. Once all these pictures were merged into one, I found myself with a giant image of 60,000-pixels wide. Obviously, such a large size is useless but I had everything needed to create masks and landmarks. The same thing happened for the displacement: I found a site that displayed greyscale topography. I took screenshots of the lake and its area then merged everything together. I then needed to generate the displacement on a subdivided plane, finding the correct height of the volcano on the net and scale it all accordingly.


Tada! That’s how a 3000 km2 terrain got created. The previously generated diffuse allowed us to add some details on the displacement. Once I had an interesting overall terrain, I sliced the 3D model into several parts. They were made into areas depending on how close or far they were from the road in order to be able to separately adjustthe various settings for displacement, texture size, scattering, and parts to sculpt in ZBrush to give them a little more diversity.


Material wise, I was able to play a bit with MegaScans! It is really awesome but I wish I had tested more things with it! I mainly retrieved some nice scans of rocks. I really like what Quixel has done with it and I sure plan on getting back to it one day!


To complete the picture, MultiScatter helped me to add some diversity to the landscape with moss, rocks, and grass.


Could you please tell us a bit about compositing? Do V-Ray Render Elements help you much in compositing?

V-Ray Render Elements helped me, obviously. They allowed me to adjust contrast or some hues for some elements even though I always try to get the closest possible of the final result in my raw renders. I think it’s high time I tried Cryptomatte instead!


On the Nuke side: nothing exceptional. I am not an expert but I know enough to obtain what I want. I enjoy adding several color layers to intensify the warm and cold tones of the image and to avoid the pixels to become completely black or overbright. Once exported, I do the color grading, the flares, and the smoke/dust backplates in After Effects.


The final touch, editing, and sound design were done in Resolve. It was the first time I used that software and it was friggin’ awesome! It runs fast!

Overall, what is difficult and what is important for automotive CGI films like this? Any tips?

It is easy to think that only 45 seconds for a video is not going to be such a huge task, especially since there is only one environment, but that’s not the case. You have to think about all the aspects of the film and lay the foundations on paper before jumping too quickly into the 3D production. It’s a mistake I’ve made all too often and that I still sometimes make Take the time to search and study your references! It is also very important to understand how to enhance a car through its materials and lighting to highlight its design curves.

Do you have any advice for artists who want to create personal CGI short films?

Even if the results are not the ones you had in mind, you deserve credit for having started a project! It is never easy to do personal projects and even harder to complete them. It is better to lower the scope of a project and complete it than the opposite. Other pieces of advice would be to prepare yourself correctly, give yourself small personal challenges and more than anything else: have fun!


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