At GDC 2024 the Substance 3D team unveiled a range of new features across its suite of apps. For Substance 3D Modeler in particular, the team announced that Modeler is currently completely free in public beta, as well as some impressive new features, including the ability to search Modeler’s asset library by shape, new surfacing tools, new camera features, and more.
How better to demonstrate the creative power of Substance 3D Modeler than by producing a project showcasing these strengths? Giovanni Nakpil and Casimir Perez began work on the short film ‘Ronda,’ first shown during the Substance 3D keynote at GDC 2024. Here, Giovanni and Casimir discuss their process in the creation of this film.
Giovanni: This project came about because we needed to create some visuals for the presentation of Modeler at GDC 2024. We ultimately had a lot of freedom for this, and I preferred to do something that wasn’t too game-specific – rather, something that was just a beautiful showcase for Modeler, in a motion design and entertainment style, that incorporated the Modeler features that we were launching at GDC.
Casimir: We decided early on that we wanted to do an isolated, diorama scene. The idea that I initially pitched to Gio was that the story would show a turtle repairing a bicycle – but this ultimately evolved into something totally different.
Giovanni: We thought it would be good to have two focused assets that effectively demonstrate the capabilities of Modeler: soft blends for a vehicle, and the more classical sculptural approach that you see with characters. We moved away from the garage idea, but we kept these two different kinds of assets in the final film.
Casimir: We also wanted to evoke the sense that this diorama was a toy, kind of – it’s something that you could put down on the furniture, somewhere. We wanted to bring out that sense of childhood nostalgia.
Giovanni: That was helpful in practical terms too – our time limit for this project was quite short, so we simply didn’t have time to work on something that would prove as complex as many of films that were our references here.
Casimir: A lot of our shared inspirations for the film came from films by Hayao Miyazaki, where you have a lot of texture in the background, or the concept art of Tonko House. The Dutch tower in their short film The Dam Keeper was one inspiration for the tower in Ronda – and so was the clock tower in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. That had a big impact on me when I was a child. We initially talked about making the tower here a clock tower, but we ultimately went a different way with it.
We finally settled on this scene of a tram moving around a plaza, with various characters dotted around, the whole thing represented as a plastic-looking toy. For the structure of the plaza, I had in mind the Puente Nuevo bridge in the town of Ronda, in the south of Spain. My paternal grandfather originally came from there; when I first saw this bridge cutting the city into two parts, with a waterfall, and vegetation all around it struck me as crazy and inspiring. The plaza in our short film doesn’t contain a bridge, but the overall look and architectural style of the Puente Nuevo really seemed appropriate here. And so, while there are some Dutch and Germanic styles coming through from our original reference images for this project, the look of the scene is essentially drawn from the south of the Mediterranean. And once we reached this point, we didn’t really plan things out very much beforehand; Gio had a lot of freedom to sculpt as he wanted, from our reference images. In terms of the tram station, this was a way to bring something a little more modern into the scene – as well as being a nod to Spirited Away, by Miyazaki. The tram brings in Gio’s background to some degree, as well. It references Miyazaki, but it’s also partly due to the fact that Gio lives in San Francisco, and is surrounded by trams.
Giovanni: The tram station was a good excuse to introduce some more characters too. I love creating characters; I decided to put three of them here. For the characters, and even for the tram, I wanted to make something very ‘chunky’. And again, if you look at a Miyazaki film, the backgrounds tend to be very realistic, but the characters are much more whimsical.
When I’m creating characters, I’m used to working in a detailed, anatomy-driven way. Here, by contrast, I wanted to stretch my skills in a more stylized approach. Casimir had sketched a turtle for our initial idea of the garage scene; that resurfaced for one of the characters here. And I spent some time on Instagram finding cute characters by various artists; that really helped me adapt to this more stylized tone.
For the characters’ clothing, I intentionally pushed the timeline back a little bit – if you look at the fox character, for instance, you see that she’s wearing very 1950s-style clothing. And the short dog character is wearing a very ‘Peaky Blinders’-style, old school flat cap. I mean, I wear caps like that too, so maybe there’s an element of myself in that one. But overall, I didn’t want any modern clothing in here; that’s just what seemed most appropriate to me.
The owl mayor character was important to our storytelling – we wanted a central character who ran the city, somebody a little mysterious and stern – but not too stern. You can see his family crest, very similar to his face, on the tower; that shows he’s pretty important.
Casimir: For the plaza, I looked at a lot of references images of Ronda and Córdoba and other places in the south of Spain – I visited my family there every summer as a child, and I have a strong memory of orange trees everywhere. And so I had to include these in the diorama. And we also added some cobblestones and some flowers, in a very structured, delimitated way. The vegetation was the biggest challenge we had we had with this project. It took some time to figure out, first, what to do in the middle, and then to show that so that it didn’t contrast too much with the rest of the scene.
Giovanni: And the vegetation needed to look physical, too, because there are a lot of close ups – it couldn’t be just a texture, or it would have destroyed the toy-like look.
Casimir: And, of course, we referred back to Miyazaki for the texturing overall. There’s a lot of textures in his films – they feel old, but not dirty; they’re aged, with a patina. Just because of time constraints, I did a lot of the texturing here procedurally. With a little more time, I think I’d have done things by hand a little more, to push the storytelling.
Giovanni: But I think that approach suited this project, because we were essentially creating a toy. We weren’t going for an in-depth cinematic look.
It took the two of us a little more than a month to create this film. That was crazy fast for just two people to create a film like this. We really had to move, to get everything ready in time for GDC.
Casimir: Incidentally, this was the first scene I textured entirely on Mac OS, on the Macbook M1 – not a super-powerful MacBook. And I just used the MacBook – no mouse, no keyboard, trackpad only. Even for rendering, I used the MacBook M1. The Blender shortcuts for trackpad and the Mac keyboard felt super-smooth. And Painter worked well with the trackpad, too.