3DVF : What technique did you use to create the Kaena characters hair and cloth and how did you animate them?

Thomas Marqué : Here is a subject that has always been fascinating me. At the beginning of the adventure, Kaena was going to have dreadlocks. Using dreadlocks is difficult because of their thickness and if any is to collide with the mesh, you can see it at first glance. From the very beginning I chose a dynamic based on cloth, Clothreyes at first and then Simcloth. We forgot about the dreads and I told Chris that maybe the challenge brought by thin and long hair was worth it.

I had noticed that, in 3D, hair were not often long and untied; in Toy story, Sid·s young sister has a really static haircut that doesn·t touch her shoulders, same thing in Final Fantasy (lot more beautiful though). In Shrek, the good old plait in the princess back (reduced risks of collisions). According to me, the only successful example of hair dynamics can be seen in Blizzard cinematics

The collisions of the hair-shoulders-face elements were a problem in Simcloth (Chaosgroup, coder : Vladimir Koylazov). I have to say that today Simcloth is still at the incredible price of zero euro. So I modelled 20 strips of cloth scattered on Kaena·s head, to be used a reference by shagHair, through the medium of another free plugin called mesh-to-spline. Of course, this method doesn·t always work. There had been many corrections because of too violent shocks with the mesh or with complex poses of the character.

We also used direct dynamics of ShagHair, mainly the wind. A Canadian animator, Emilio Gorayeb also helped us. He solved many difficult takes, only using ShagHair. Finally, we van say that at least half of the team worked on the ·hair problem·. Today more reliable solutions can be found thanks to more and more powerful processors and the development of numerous new tools. By the way, I could test the rope function in Discreet Reactor and it can produce amazing results.

3DVF : Chris told us that the introduction took you about 3 years of work Can you tell us about this scene?

Thomas Marqué : Three years indeed, off and on. I grabbed the opportunity to work on this 3 minutes long sequence at the very beginning of the project. Quite often, Chris was telling me about a lost Alien ship at the beginning of the movie, with no precise idea on the subject. But I had a precise idea !

Very often, in movies starting in deep space, with the camera focusing on one or more ships (Starwars, Alien, ·), the director chooses a general take, most of the time imposing and tripping (deep infrabass), and when the camera is close enough, the take is always cut and we end inside the spaceship, following the actors. The idea was not to cut this very sequence. The ship is flying toward us and all of a sudden we cross right through it, furtively catching the moments of panic caused by the disaster.

 Tarik Hamedine made a front view drawing of the spaceship and I started modelling and testing camera travelling shots. I often interrupted this very work to deal with other effects. Consequently, this sequence could only be fully delivered at the beginning of the year 2002. For the inside of the spaceship, I gathered all the elements modelled by other members of the team and tried to make something coherent. Leading a sequence from the idea to the compositing is a marvellous experience and I was luck enough to do the same thing on a few other takes of Kaena.