Manou the Swift and Forest Pack

Forest Pack Pro was an extremely helpful tool on the production of Manou the Swift and a great timesaver. To design and fill the Landscapes with plants and other foliage as well as ground details like stones, branches or dead leaves, Forest Pack was very useful, intuitive and easy to use. In a matter of a few minutes, one person was able to fill a set with natural details the way it should be. Not only by quickly setting procedural rules, but also by painting areas for different props or assets with the brush tools of Forest Pack directly in a 3ds Max scene

The Tool is so versatile, that we even used it for scattering parts of the City Nice. We used it especially on the surrounding hills, but it also for creating villages on the hills and Coastline.

Railclone, another procedural tool, that is working with arrays, was also helpful for building different sets. Anywhere where we could use a rule-based system to speed up the creation process it came in handy. Like the Promenade along the Bay if Angles for example. It´s a very long and curved Street along the Beach, that inhabits some elements, like streetlights, banks, trashcans and so forth that are repeatedly placed along this long strip. These props were more easy to place along the stretch of promenade with such a rule and spline-based system.

The houses fencing the Promenade were distributed using Railclone too. We created a "Housebuilder" to fasten the process of creating different typical Nice houses. Railclone was the base for it. We generated different elements and modules that the "Housebuilder" would use to assemble the houses, whether they were one, two or more stories tall.

For Manou we use Forest Pro mainly for the vegetation, specific kinds of flower, trees, grass, stones, nests, bushes. That allows us to create very complex scenes with a small amount of time and a small rendering footprint because Forest is very optimized for V-Ray in terms of speed and memory consumption. Our 3D lead, Alexander Hupperich, is using it every day to fill empty rocks with life by just a few clicks, but at the same time, he is fully in control. He can add or remove single objects, paint additional elements or pave a path for Manou’s friends to walk. That is the real power of this tool, using existing presets and generating your own, filling a scene procedurally but still have the power to influence single objects and dress the sets your way.

For Manou we decided to go in a realistic design direction with characteristic details and shapes. Our movie plays in Nice, so we altered the today cityscape and made an ideal version of it. You will recognize the characteristics and landmarks which make Nice so unique like the Big Bay of Angels, the harbour, the flower market, the big rock, the cemetery, the beach, and some famous hotels. But we tell the story from a bird’s point of view, meaning from exceptional perspectives like top views or low angles. Humans are just background characters since the birds feel safe when they fly.

One big challenge was the stretch our birds can cover while flying. So we needed a more universal approach to cover a long distance ride in one shot versus a limited environment for a single Shot. Our 3D lead Alexander Hupperich developed a smart set for Nice to work with flyovers: It covers an area of about 10 km x 10 km in one 3ds Max scene. That allows us to put the camera on all different angles, using V-Ray sun to set the light situation and pressing render. This highly optimized set needs around 60 Gbyte RAM and renders in 30 minutes per frame, but we do not have to worry about it anymore. This is possible due to Forest Pro, this great tool handles trillions of polygons in a scene and we could fly along the cityscape and up to the hills without reworking the scene. For close-ups we still use separate sets, but they also consist of Forest Pro objects and V-Ray proxies.