lodeve

Trace and Inverse Trace Stratigraphic Book

This article is part of a series on the making of the museum of Lodève.
For Lodève’s museum, we worked on many different aspects, short animation movies, cartographic video projections and 3D scans of fossils such as spoors or bones. For the latter, one topic of particular interest was the recreation of a 3D book of stratigraphic layers, such that you can turn and see the trace on the front, and the inverse trace on the back of each page.

In this article, we will explain how we have reproduced the double page for the fossil rain. The book is only meant to be educational, so we were allowed to recreate a surface with rain drop craters which were too small to be scanned with our equipment.

Recent dried traces of rain drops. Photo: S. Fouché ©Musée de Lodeve

Cartoon fire effect

This article is part of a series on the making of the museum of Lodève. In the movies, there were scenes taking place in caves or at dusk. So we had to create a fire effect, with a cartoon render to suit the art direction, and that could have a torch-like movement.

We have tested many techniques in Blender or Fusion:
– mesh displacement,
– 2D texture with UV distorsions,
– particules with metaballs
– mask particules
– alpha additive particules

This exploration allowed us to find the most efficient ways of making fire according to the case, knowing that Blender was our main tool from layout to lighting, except for the compositing where Fusion was used.

Opening the Museum of Lodève

In january 2017 we started working on the ambitious reopening of the Musée de Lodève, Lodève’s museum, a small town in the south of France. The project was already years in the making, and we jumped onboard to create more than an hour of movies for the three main themes: Geology (540 millions years of life and tectonics), Archaeology and Beaux-Arts (fine arts). In the near future we will be releasing some tools and making of made for that production. In the meantime, allow us to introduce the project and the grand opening which took place early July. Nothing technical for now, but the production background of that project which took us so much energy.

This article is available in French on the studio’s website / Cet article est disponible en français sur le site web du studio.