Sugarlandia
A single-shot 3D film for Don Papa Rum, a stylized journey across the handcrafted island of Sugarlandia.
Overview
Omelet came to me with a concept for Don Papa Rum: a single-shot 3D film with a stylized render, telling the story of where the rum comes from. Omelet held the creative direction, and I directed the film and handled the art direction and look dev. I also ran all of the project management, leading the team through the modeling and the animal animations. We built the island of Sugarlandia from scratch, thousands of handcrafted trees, plants and flowers, from wild animals to sugar cane fields at the foot of a volcano.
One island, one shot
The whole film is a single continuous camera move, animated over 1800 frames, and that shot was the base every artist worked from. I laid out the entire island and set the camera myself, so the team had a fixed frame to build to. To keep it manageable I drove the camera on two splines, one for its position and one for its target, and smoothed the final motion with the dynamic properties of Cinema 4D's Motion Camera tag, one of my favorite features.
Building the world
I handled the scattering and generation of the thousands of trees, plants and flowers across the island. I built the terrains in World Creator and the vegetation with SpeedTree and Forester, while the team textured in Substance, ran the simulations in Houdini and animated in Maya. I brought everything back into Cinema 4D and Arnold for the final render.
A stylized, illustrated look
The film's non-photoreal render came from a procedural toon shader I developed in Arnold for this project. It gave the whole world its illustrated feel while holding up across the single continuous shot.
Rendering a heavy scene
To bring the Maya animation into Cinema 4D, I leaned on Arnold's render operators. The alembic caches loaded at render time through Arnold procedurals, and materials were assigned automatically from the names inside each .abc file. On a scene this dense, that took an enormous amount of manual work out of the pipeline.
Credits
Omelet
- Creative Direction
- Florian Bodet
- Production
- Erica HaraZeynep TaslicaJesse Romero
Point Flottant Studio
- Direction & Art Direction
- Mattias Peresini
- Look Dev
- Mattias Peresini
- Project Management
- Mattias Peresini
- Layout, Camera & Environment
- Mattias Peresini
- Shading, Lighting & Compositing
- Mattias Peresini
- 3D Modeling
- Morgane CostantiniMattias PeresiniKornel MakarovErwan Stephan
- 3D Animation
- Simon PujazonPushpendra SharmaMattias PeresiniErwan Stephan
- 3D Simulations
- Jérémy Reveniaud
