Dali Alive is an immersive experience that brings to life the work of Salvidore Dali. I was tasked by Grande Experiences to create a segment of the show for the period that covered his work conceptualising set pieces for the movie "Spellbound". The usual method of bringing his work to life in the space was a fairly standard 2.5D method in AE. i.e. splitting the paintings apart, repainting missing bg elements & animating in AE. However, for the Spellbound section of the show we wanted to bring a different feeling, evoking being on a period sound stage, like we had snuck on set after wrapping filming for the day. Rather than trying to recreate the final set pieces used in the film we wanted to show the actual concept artwork Dali did. So we created a whole 3d space and envisioned the artwork as set pieces that come together as a reveal.
Four artworks were showcased, split into two by two sequences. It required some trial and error for the speed of the camera movement through the space. If we went too fast, it created general feeling of vertigo & queziness in the viewer. Lateral tracking movement of the camera read better for parallax at such a large viewing size, with camera push ins reading more as zooms rather than a move in 3d.
Rendered in Redshift at 5k and upresed to 10k in post, the layout and animation was done in Maya, and set pieces were a mixture of hand made and pre-bought elements. Items like the film lights, chairs and film cameras were bought and cleaned up, while the other elements (canvas cycloramas, scaffolding, ropes, bg boxes, curtains, etc) were built as procedural assets using Houdini and assembled in Maya via Houdini Engine. The main artwork set piece boards were built in maya, but any scaffolding/support beams around them was done using a houdini asset inside of Maya that used the Maya geometry as base inputs. Photo splitting and re-painting was done in Photoshop, other textures created using Substance Painter.