Mooned was a short film made to be shown in theaters before Migration, a great project to work on. I was in charge of look development and later worked on the environments, which involved creating some sets, surfacing, and instancing.
Creating a non-boring look for a flat surface and a uniform-colored moon was quite challenging. It was all about instancing, microdisplacement, and subtle variations.
The layout was designed like movable pieces that could be shifted from one shot to another to achieve strong compositions. As part of the look development, I created procedural shading, including blending normals between the ground and meshes such as craters, rocks and mountains.
It was set dressed shot by shot so I developed a procedural method to instance and texture the moon ground to achieve the desired look, then refined and enhanced the details for each shot to create variations where needed.
I was in charge of the modeling and surfacing of the whole environment.
- Houdini (Procedural modeling base mesh and instancing)
- Zbrush (Sculpted parts)
- Tilable textures drived by masks and color vertex attributes.
The near views were achieved using microdisplacement, microinstancing, and microtessellation… it was all about the micro details!
The Rover was a very interesting prop to work on.
It needed to stay close to real-world references, but could also be adapted into a more cartoonish style.
I also handled the modeling and surfacing of the ground.
I did several props in the short.
I had the freedom to explore and define a look that reflected the character’s minimalist and technological vibe