The Story of Europe

The history of Europe is one of artistic genius, scientific breakthroughs and classic music and literature on one side, but on the other there's war and bloody conquest, leading to the world we know today. That contrasting history of Europe was the basis of the creative brief given to Mike Sharpe, Founding Partner and Creative Director of Found Studio, by Viasat World, for a new TV series.

The opening animation for this tour through the ages needed to show 3D sculptures that represented different themes explored by the TV show, from war and revolution to art, religion, science and exploration. The sculptures were then to combine into a figurine of a modern day woman, representing Europeans today as being the sum of many different elements throughout European history.

It seemed like it would be fairly straightforward at the start. Just bring in a load of existing 3D models and give them a tweak. Except the reality was a little different, as Mike explained, “At first we assumed that we would be able to source existing 3D models for each sculpture but we soon found out that wasn't true”

“For example, no model exists of Caesar without his breastplate. Liberty is based on a painting. There is no model for Franz Ferdinand or Columbus, so these needed to modelled from scratch from photographs of statues. In addition, each sculpture had its own creative concept - tattoos, blood, water, shattering, explosions - so a variety of techniques were used to execute all the creative ideas.”

The team initially used ZBrush to create the models, or adapt off-the-shelf ones. Mike and the team then used native Cinema 4D deformers to position different meshes - for example, the FFD deformer was used to pose the Anatomical face into the body of the sculpture of David.

What really helped was the integration between ZBrush and Substance Painter with Cinema 4D for modelling and texturing. In terms of getting the models back into Cinema 4D, Mike noted, “We imported them as .obj or .fbx with UVs. We needed ZBrush in order to retopologise the meshes since the scans were very dense with triangulated polygons.”

Having created the sculptures, a variety of effects were created to show running blood on the Statue of Liberty, Caeser’s sword fracturing, a liquid gold effect, and so on. A number of different utilities were employed for these, from X-Particles and Houdini to Cinema 4D’s own Voronoi Fracture, using Cinema 4D as the central application hub before exporting everything out to After Effects.

The running blood effect was an X-Particles simulation following the surface of the hand and arm, after Mike used the Skinner object to create a smoothed mesh. He explained, "We utilised the MoGraph Voronoi Fracture and Effectors with falloff, to break up Caesar's sword and also to divide the head of the European bust that features in the endframe."

The water simulation in the gold Columbus scene, though, was achieved simply by using a noise deformer inside Cinema 4D. All the camera work was done natively as well. Mike revealed, "We import our Houdini simulations as Alembic files, giving us the freedom to change our cameras as much as required."

The end result was a HD resolution animation some 40 seconds in length that featured over a million polygons in the final scene. It was rendered out on Found Studio's six render client Intel Xeon workstations. Mike remarked that Found managed to pull the entire project together in just four weeks because, "Cinema 4D was just great at wrangling all the 3rd party plugins and software solutions that we needed to achieve the project."

All images courtesy of Found Studio.

Found Studio Website:
www.found-studio.com