Lightfarm, a multi-award-winning visual arts production house used Marvelous Designer to make ultra-realistic CGI videos. Watch the interesting "Snooze" Project.

Interview with Lightfarm Studios

1. Could you briefly introduce your team?

In 2010, Lightfarm was opened in Auckland, New Zealand. In a short time, the studio gained worldwide notoriety and opened branches in Australia, Singapore, and Brazil, where our largest studio is now located, in Rio de Janeiro. In 2020, Lightfarm opened another new studio in São Paulo, focused mainly on new technologies, specializing in XR (AR and VR). Lightfarm is a multi-award-winning visual arts production house recognized by Cannes and winner of the LIA Grand Prix. Delivering stress-free creative solutions on time and on budget, we build and produce everything, from ultra-realistic CGI images and videos to AR filters and VR applications. Our core values are good service, efficiency, and artistic quality.

2.  Introduction of "Snooze" Project

"Snooze" is the most ambitious project to date for the Lightfarm teams. To create this 4-minute short film, it was necessary to capture more than 50 scenes in 10 different places over five months of production. To get to the final result, the capture needed to be on triple levels. First, we filmed the dancer in the actual locations, then we filmed the same choreographed take without the dancer, and finally, we re-recorded the choreography of all the scenes to capture movements in our studio. 

With motion capture, our animators were able to bring the virtual character to life. We physically simulated the clothes on an invisible 3D model - a crucial step brilliantly directed by Rafael Coppola using Marvelous Designer. 

[Marvelous Designer] Pattern making #1

[Marvelous Designer] Pattern making #2

[Marvelous Designer] Pattern making #3

Final Outfits

To light up the scenes, we capture HDRs from the actual locations and use these HDRs to illuminate the virtual character, thus creating a sense of visual realism. Finally, the post-production, led by Thiago Paladino, composed these different pieces of the puzzle, creating a playful yet realistic composition. 

"Snooze" was a film where we managed to mix all the digital art disciplines in one project for the first time. All of this was possible thanks to high-end software and features, plus an outstanding team of professionals.

Video#2 Making Film

3. A Brief Workflow in Animation for Snooze Project

To animate it, Rafael Coppola used an animated model that was the basis of the girl dancing. To try to make the simulation smoother, he simulated with a time step of 60 fps, even though the animation had 30 fps - this means that he simulated the animation with a higher time step than the real animation. He also used a time step of 0.016666666666, and 7 in number of simulation, and also increased gravity a little. The export was all in Alembic with 30 fps, and the thickness was made using C4D. In addition to these softwares, we also used Maya, Houdini, Redshift, Rokoko, Adobe Photoshop, Animate CC, After Effects, Nuke and DaVinci Resolve throughout the project.

4. Would you like to recommend Marvelous Designer to other 3D artists and why?

"Marvelous Designer is incredible because it offers great editing and creating power of pieces of all levels of complexity. It's fundamental to all my cloth projects", says Coppola.

"Although Marvelous Designer is not made for video, we managed to extract the best from the tool so that it worked beautifully in the film "Snooze", just as we saw in titles like "Love Death and Robots" and "Spiderverse". The clothes simulation and its animation were complex but crucial stages in which Marvelous served us very well to make the main character even more striking!", says Milton Menezes, Director of Snooze.

by Lightfarm Studios

Link to Lightfarm Studios official website