CG film production pipeline?

#1

Hi everyone :wink: I am new to the world of making movies and CG in general, although I have read a lot in a short time, watched a lot and practiced a lot too. I am working on a short CG film where there is a realistic character, well, everything is realistic, basically. And even though the character is one, and there are only a few scenes, however, I want to do everything as best as possible. The foundation for a successfully completed project is the pipeline. And here I am - I ask you to take a look at the pipeline below, which I wrote for my project, and say what you see as a mistake, what you would like to change / add, etc. Any help would be appreciated :slight_smile:

  1. Research
  2. Story, script
  3. Concept
  4. Storyboard (color script)
  5. Animatic and editing test
  6. Character Design (below is a list of steps)
    - Base Model
    - Rough rig – (Goes to previs)
    - High Res Model
    - Retopo
    - UV Unwrap
    - Muscle system modeling
    - Polypaint
    - Texturing
    - Final model lookdev, render
  7. Assets – cloth, accessories, groom, environment (Modeling, retopo, UV, Texturing, lookdev, rigging)
  8. Character setup
    - Final rig
    - Basic skinning for animation and layout
    - Final skinning/muscle system and secondary animation controls for Final animation
  9. Layout
  10. Animation
  11. Final animation
  12. Effects, simulation
  13. Lighting
  14. Rendering
  15. Compositing
  16. Editing, grading, etc
  17. Sound
#2

Is this a one person/personal project or a team effort with a budget?

Is it all hand keyed or will you be using a mocap/retargeting solution and
if this a Dialog Drive narrative how will you do voice recording
and lipsync & facial animation.

What render engine are you using??

you mention retopo for the Character and clothing thus I assume you are
planning a Hi-res sculpting based asset creation workflow likely using Zbrush.

Do you have much experience in this content creation area??

#3

Personal project, and speaking about animation - I’m gonna go hard and make everything without mocap :slight_smile: because, first of all, I just don’t have the opportunity to use it, and, second, there are not a lot of animation, so mocap becomes less vital.
No voice, character have no dialog lines, so no need in recording it.
Still not really sure about render engine, V-Ray was my general solution, but I’ll see how it goes on the process. Who knows, maybe I will have to switch to Redshift for technical reasons.
Umm, yeah, you get it right, I’m using Zbrush.
Well, I have a small experience in every step of mentioned pipeline, let’s say :slight_smile: Once I have done small animated commercial, but I even didn’t need to use anything except Maya, I modelled everything right there, rigging and animation were the biggest parts. But now it’s my first time working with realistic human character, so I would like to know If I’m making some mistakes on pipeline level.