DEVELOPMENT by Ludovic Habas


Why ?

Moving from creation to development is not easy. However, in the face of certain technical challenges and to increase my efficiency and my creative possibilities, developing my own tools quickly became interesting.

Cube creative

During my first professional experience at Cube Creative. I was responsible for the creation and setup of some Props and especially some FX cartoons. One of the biggest challenges was the realization of a flame setup. It had to be reusable at will and be able to quickly change its size, shape and color.

FX Cube low

To do this setup, I learned Maxscript, the internal language of 3ds Max. This allowed me to add to my rig the necessary options to play with different settings of my FX as desired.

Canal +

During our studies, I worked on a short film project for Canal +. This short film tells the story of a character evolving in a pixel world. The technical challenge on this project and that the whole environment had to be modeled with small cubes. To reduce our modeling time, I have developed tools to accelerate modeling in pixels. It also allowed us to build the earth of the film in pixel. Which would have been impossible because too long to do manually.

 

FX Rubika low

Rubika Planet

Rigging and development

With this first experience and finding biped (the only rig of 3ds max at the time) too rigid for my taste and binding to animate, I decided to start the creation of my own auto-rig. A project that I have never stopped and that I continue to develop today through the productions.

My auto-rig will make its debut on 3 Supinfocom films in 2011: Tuurngait, Douce Menace and A fox tale.

Rig Tuurngait

Watchmaking

My first professional experiences have been the realization of watch adverts with the studio Le-Truc.ch. These projects were all pretty similar. So lot of work could be automated. For two years I worked on developing tools to improve the efficiency of the studio's 3D pipe. The first tool was a watch auto-rig. The tool allow to calculate the number of teeth of each wheel and the relations between them automatically.

Montre low

Then I made many other tools like UVs placement tools, automatic modeling tools (screws, rubies ...), animation and rig tools (exploded rig, strap rig...).

Manager

The most important tool realized within this studio was the realization of a scene manager.

The tool allowed to organize 3D parts. Indeed some watches contain thousands of pieces and quickly become a nightmare to organize. The tool can also manage Nespresso scenes, another recurring project of this studio. Finally a second part of the script makes it possible to manage all the rendering parameters quickly (Vray, Deadline ...) and to manage the passes of renderings necessary to realize the images.

Manager montre low

Crowdfunding

Wishing to develop and improve my animation tools, I embarked on a crowdfunding project in 2014. To my surprise the campaign found its audience and was a success. This motivated me to resume the development of my animation tools in order to share them. It is from this campaign that my first site CG-Animation.com is born to be able to share and sell my tools.

Kisskissbangbang

During this period I mainly access my efforts on auto-rig and some tools around. The goal was to make it a complete rig, with a lot of cartoons options to make any animation while keeping an easy-to-use tool. With the help of animator friends and Mopa students as beta testers, I was able to sell this first tool in March 2014. A few days later it was used in a first short film "Horde" of the collective Brutus.

Les légendaires

I was contacted on the project series "Les légendaires" to perform the rigs of all characters. More than a hundred rigs. The goal was also to make the management of all these characters and their animations simple and intuitive for the animators.

Legendaire 320

So I developed for several weeks a manager of rigs and animation with the facilitators allowing them to easily select their character, to transfer their animation from one character to another and from one animator to another. Working on "Les légendaires" was a very rewarding experience. This allowed me to better understand the specific needs of the 3D animation series and to deeply improve my tools.

Technical legendaires

Animate more naturally

In a demo of their animation tools for their short film Presto and Monster University at the NVidia GTC conference, Pixar shows an incredible animation system with no visible controller in the viewport. I wondered if it would be possible for me to reproduce this in 3ds Max. From my research I developed a new tool NoController allowing to control a rig directly with zones on modeling without needing to display the controllers. A more pleasant way to animate.

NoController low

Spiderman: new generation

When I saw the incredible movie and the making of that Sony Pictures Animation gave us with Spiderman: new generation I wondered if it would be possible for me to develop the "same" kind of tool they developed for their film in 3ds Max. Namely a drawing system 2D style but which is modeled in the 3D space. This allows you to add 2D effects directly to 3D scenes.

So I gave myself this challenge during my free time. A very interesting technical challenge. The tool is only in beta, but when I finish it you can get it and all the other tools in the dedicated section.

MaxPencil cganimation