“Ratatoskr” by Müller and Lohfink
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Title:
- Ratatoskr
Conference:
Director(s):
Description:
Two things immediately stand out when watching the student film Ratatoskr: the high production quality of its characters and the complexity of its environment. From the upper, bright layer of the world-tree of Yggdrasil, to the darker, cave-like lower layer, each set of this film is overflowing with details in every nook and cranny. The environment became a character in and of itself during production, being planned out carefully to make only specific areas visible in an effort to tackle the enormous complexity of our Maya scenes once set-dressing had started. So how did we tackle this important part of the storytelling? Our approach was to split out the set-dressing into several Maya scenes and use Maya’s paint effects. After having first created a big asset library of plants, we realized that they would not work as well as we had hoped, and that we would need something that would grow around the tree-trunks more organically – some procedural generated vegetation, that takes the actual surface and the underlying normal orientation into account. A bunch of bespoke plant presets, pipeline scripts and automations helped us to paint directly on the high-poly surfaces of the tree trunks, convert everything to polygons, handle UVs, and finally write out a geometry cache. Using this approach, every member of the team was capable of creating environments by themselves, which was a huge time-saver and productivity-booster for us. Everything was assembled via a scenegraph-XML file (which saved world space position and references to all of the scene elements) that was later parsed into Katana to assemble the individual cached assets together. In summary, it is fair to say that Katana, and our shotgun-based pipeline, were the most important pillars for accomplishing a high production quality throughout the film.
