The Hunt – Texturing the bear
The texture is what really gives life to our model. We wanted it to portray the link between the bear and the environment. Nyah is a spirit that affects her environment; she modifies the season and ends as part of the stars. This relationship needs to be apparent in her design to make the audience understands who she is immediately.
I started by making texture mock ups in Photoshop, inspired by wood and mountains. We felt that a more realistic bear with CG fur would not fit the aesthetic of our project as everything else looks hand painted so I had to find a different style to texture her.
The first texture I painted in Mari for the bear was inspired by all these concept paintings. I was inspired by totem poles and Native American wood carvings. As a result the bear looks like a wooden statue rather than a living spirit. It is hard to imagine how she would move and her appearance is too far stretched for the audience to fully empathise with her.
After trying a few variations, I decided to start the texture over, looking at it from a new perspective. I went back to the blue tones that Maya and I felt compelling in the concepts and wondered how I could paint fur in a stylistic manner. She is a mother, which for me leads to a lot of soft curves and she is also more of a spirit than a physical bear, so she needs to look celestial in a way. She jumps into the stars at the end, as if that is where she truly belongs, so I found it interesting to show that she had that connection since the beginning, by giving her a connection to the sky rather than the earth.
In the end, I added more age and dirt to the texture, to show that she has been through a lot of experiences in her life. As well as a diffuse texture, I also painted a glossiness map to define soft reflections and added a slight bump to suggest the irregularities of her fur. As she is quite often in the foreground, she can have more details than the rest of the environment. She is the centre of attention and therefore can have quite a complex texture.
But her texture changes as the story evolves. Indeed when she gets shot, sharp red lines cover a part of her fur. Contrarily to all the subtle variations she has naturally, this red colour is flat and decisive. It’s her blood that shows the danger she is under and the fact that she has lost control of the situation.
To achieve this effect I procedurally generated a distorted red star in Substance Designer. This program lets the user define parameters that can be animated at render time, which allowed for the blood star to be spreading over the fur of the bear. Because I had tested this technique before the final bear was approved, I knew I needed UVs that would be unwrapped almost as one unique shell to allow for the texture to spread. In effect, the texture is generated on a 2D square plane so if there are seams in the UVs, these will be visible in the final texture.
To get the final sequence, I rendered the bear with its usual texture and separate passes for diffuse, raw gi and raw lighting. I then rendered the blood spreading as a black and white sequence and used it as an alpha to mask a red colour onto the bear.
