Creating Fantastic Visuals for Love, Death & Robots

Befores & Afters posted an interview with Alberto Mielgo, art director of THE WITNESS (Love, Death & Robots), Into the Spiderverse and many other outstanding projects.

Animation

The Witness, a 3rd Episode of the popular animation series, received a great amount of attention due to its stunningly realistic visual design.

Many people got fooled thinking that it was shot in motion capture or live-action. None of these things are about The Witness.

We’ll make it clear for you.

“This is keyframe animation.”, said Alberto Mielgo. “It’s something where people are writing to me like, “Hey, you have to prove this!”

Keyframe animation is also used by Disney and Pixar.

Clothing

To create clothing, Alberto decided to use Marvelous Designer. “I’ve always liked the program because I like fashion myself”. Marvelous Designer did a great job.

“I just wanted the cloth to feel natural. Clothes in real life, they’re impossible to control, so I thought it was the perfect program. We needed to do a lot of things in order for this cloth to work properly. But the final result was really cool. I mean, I really like the movement and it feels very natural.”

Shading of the clothes was done by Zeno Pelgrims. He was able to make very graphic and realistic shading for the clothes at the same time. As you may’ve noticed everything looked natural but also very impressionistic. Every team followed this rule – realistic but graphic.

Rendering

Alberto Mielgo confirmed that the lighting was crucial in getting this kind of realism. They decided to use a flat painting instead of a 3D modeled light.

After each shot was fully composed and rendered, the team was adjusting the levels. The key goal was to reach the best level of realism possible. They tried to predict and recreate camera behavior under certain conditions.

You can find more information and full interview here.