CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON

The team at DIGIC Pictures discuss the studio’s pipeline and tools of choice

At DIGIC the pipeline is based on Autodesk’s Maya and Foundry’s Nuke, supplemented with various tools developed in-house. Among other things, we have our own instance tool for repetitive tasks that appear with large crowds. With this tool, it is relatively easy to design blades of grass, flowers and vegetation on the battlefield, or even a chain mail armour with numerous chain links. We also use Zbrush, Substance Painter, Houdini, Marvelous Designer, Blender, RV, Golaem, among many other tools.

We established a fully cached pipeline during the pre-production stage to reach better performance and faster turnarounds. That means almost every asset, from characters to environments and effects, on-screen is based on some type of cached data – geometries, instances, clothes, fur or hair. This in itself doesn’t sound too complicated, but the real challenge is to manage, review and push through the pipeline all these different caches. We had difficult days when we were putting the battle scenes together and suddenly there were a lot of different types of things in the scenes at the same time.