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Dany Bittel
As a kid, I was very afraid of the dark. I always had to listen to
stories on the casette tape before going to bed. Otherwise I would panic from fear
of thinking about all kinds of creatures and ghosts, and never fall asleep. I felt safe with
Fuchur (Falkor) and Atréju (Atreyu), Tintin, Momo and other characters. It wasn't too long
before I wanted to recreate them and my own imaginary worlds. I tried
stop motion, video, animation, puppets, writing, comics... pretty much
everything and I failed more or less in all of them. My standards were too
high.
Then I found 3D graphics and guess what -- failed again! It was too hard
and too buggy back then but I still somehow liked it. About 5 years
later in 2001, I started my professional career as an intern at a motion
design company. There, I wrote my one and only application and it ended up being a pretty
bad one too. After 2005, I was a self-employed all around 3D artist,
mainly doing TV commercials. I love the little, tight-knit film community
here in Zürich. Currently I've joined forces and built a 3D base here
with a couple of very good friends. We founded Elefant Studios back in
March. I'm 28 now.
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| The Area:
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3D/comp artist Dany Bittel lives in the Swiss city of Zurich, where the population is just under 400,000... We're glad to have you here on the AREA, Dany. Tell us, what is it that you do typically?
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| Dany:
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I'd say I'm a generalist. I've just started to get more specialized in shading and rendering and also organizing and leading bigger projects. There's a really small 3D community in Zürich, so you just end up doing lots of different things. This can be good, because you get to try out new things that are challenging and interesting. But it can also be annoying because you cannot really delve into one particular subject and truly get to know all the details about it. It's starting to change though, as we've formed a bigger studio and have begun to specialize.
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| The Area:
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How long have you been doing this work?
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| Dany:
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For quite long now, started out when I was a kid at around 15. I was quite frustrated at that time, cause my standards of quality were way too high, so I never really finished anything. I changed software a couple of times, but still thought everything looked too 3D -- too computer generated. I did my first commercial job in around 2001, when I was 21. Started as a junior at a motion design firm. It took me some time to realize that I was a 3D artist.
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| The Area:
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How did you become involved with working in 3D and do you remember the first 3D application you've ever used? ;-)
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| Dany:
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That's got to be POV-Ray. I used it because I wanted to code games, so I needed graphics.
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| The Area:
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Did you have any previous knowledge of computers?
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| Dany:
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Yes definitely, I knew a lot about computers and did a lot of image manipulations with photos.
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| The Area:
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What were your impressions of working in a 3D headspace?
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| Dany:
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My first time working in Maya was a huge eye-opener, I loved the way you could move in 3D space and the Hotbox…All the other software I used before had such unintuitive ways to move in 3D...it always felt like work, just tumbling and looking at your scene.
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| The Area:
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Given your initial impression of 3D, what made you decide to pursue it?
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| Dany:
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I'm not really the guy that makes big decisions and then does them. I just kind of see a path that looks interesting and follow it -- or I try to avoid things I don't like or want to do. So, I just kind of grew into 3D. I might do something else in the future…
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| The Area:
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During your limbo in 3D, did you explore any other career/life avenues?
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| Dany:
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Yeah, I started washing dishes at a hotel, and later cooked as well. It was O.K., I just didn't liked that everything you made got eaten and was gone afterwards. You know, I always put so much into it and the next day you start from scratch all over again. Also I didn't like the smell. However, aside from that, I think it's very similar to 3D and especially compositing, you know, you pick different ingredients and have to blend them together to make one new tasty thing.
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| The Area:
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You also worked at a motion design company for a period of time, can you tell us about it?
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| Dany:
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Actually the company split and we all went freelance after that. We still had some clients left from the company so it wasn't so hard getting jobs.
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| The Area:
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Being a freelance artist can be tricky at times, given that there may be no certainty about landing the next job. How did you manage initially and was it hard to consistently get contracts?
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| Dany:
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What I did is quite different to what I think you would call a "Freelancer". I was actually more like “self employed”. I didn't go around looking for jobs at studios and I've never worked outside of Switzerland actually. The clients, which typically weren't VFX studios came to me to have something done. I was more like a one-man VFX shop. My clients included a few production companies that primarily did commercials. I had a lot of luck too -- never made any advertisements, asides from maintaining an up-to-date website. I just had four important clients too, and they came with regular work.
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| The Area:
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For those who are interested to pursue the path of working freelance, could you describe your experience and offer some "survival" advice?
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| Dany:
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Be humble, be a bit unique (I had pink hair at some point, people still know me because of that), try to network, keep your contacts and your website up to date, and don't be too “official”. Also, have one field where you really shine (and don't decide on it too early in your career or because of demand, it has to be the field you really love).
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| The Area:
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Now you are co-founder and co-owner of Elefant Studios. Can you tell us about your company and what was the decision to leave behind self-employment to form the studio?
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| Dany:
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The jobs my clients wanted me to do slowly outgrew me. So it was only logical to form a team. Now I really like working in a team. It's quite different and a first for me. We're working on a pipeline to streamline things. It's definitely a first in Switzerland where most post production companies just have a handful of 3D/comp artists that mostly work independently, they don't really think through how to efficiently work together. That's what interests me.
It's also cool that it's just our team of ten 3D and comp artists founding this company -- no big investors. So we can take it much easier, have no big commitments and can mostly take things as they come. It's even encouraged to still work freelance; two of us are working in Germany right now, some do teaching.
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| The Area:
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What is the primary service that Elefant Studios provides?
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| Dany:
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Visual Effects and Animation for commercials is probably the biggest chunk. Besides that, we do some random 3D stuff like visualizations, corporate movies, event films, AD Screens, posters ... even 2D illustrations, Flash game graphics. We are a mix of different talents, so it's good like that.
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| The Area:
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Let's talk about some of the commercial work you've done, starting with Swisscom Dentures. Can you tell us about the production process and actually what is the commercial about?
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| Dany:
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The production company came to me with that commercial, when I was still a one man show, so they were really concerned If I could make it.. or if I was going to have an accident. They ended up telling their client that there were “a few 3D artists” working on it and just took the risk with me. I had 5 weeks to do the project. I used RealFlow for the water, Maya for the 3D and After Effects for compositing. Rendered the whole thing basically on my workstation… while I worked every weekend, it wasn't that bad since there were no all-nighters. The most challenging part was the fluid, I had not done much in RealFlow before that. Also challenging was the compositing, because After Effects is not the right tool for something like that, so it turned into a huge mess after some time.
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The commercial itself is about being able to phone for free if you're young. Not terribly original.
| The Area:
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How was the idea of talking dentures conceived?
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| Dany:
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The idea came from the advertising company, they also mostly decided on the dialog. The director interpreted it, guided the actor and did all the things on set. He also worked closely together with me, refining the animation. I was on the set as well, telling them which clean plates I needed, I made an HDRI and a couple of photos.
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| The Area:
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What sort of challenges did you run into during production?
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| Dany:
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Fluids were challenging, until I found out how the units work in RealFlow. It still took a very long time to simulate (something like 10 hours for each glass), so I had not many changes to make to it. Rendering was also challenging, there were no buffers or layer functionality in Maya at the time, so I had to get the passes out with different scene files -- organizing that was challenging. Also all the passes had to work through refractions.
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| The Area:
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The quality of the dentures rendered is superb -- which renderer did you use?
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| Dany:
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Thanks, it's mental ray for Maya. I was really lucky that the SSS shaders just came out, otherwise it would have been difficult. The textures are all hand-painted, they look quite cheesy by itself, but that shader made them photoreal.
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Besides that it's a lot of reflections, some AO and a bit of faked Environment light. It was still almost 30 passes in the end.
| The Area:
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The Billag series of commercials is very endearing given its cartoony stylization. Can you tell us about it?
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| Dany:
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They are from the same director that did the dentures, so he already knew me well. He wanted me to find a team to do them with. The time frame was around 3 months for the first 3 minutes, which was quite crazy given that we had to come up with all of the characters (around 11) and all props had to be done from scratch. We were 4 people doing 3D, we had no pipeline, two of us didn't know Maya well… I had never led a team and we didn't even have a room where we could work! So it was quite challenging. My initial decisions were: we need some sort of pipeline and we need as much time as possible for animation, so it was basically one lighting setup and one beauty pass, almost no comp!
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At some point we worked in this room:
| The Area:
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What did you use to simulate things like the batter in the mixing bowl, the egg yolk, snow and the smoke?
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| Dany:
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Yukio came up with the egg yolk, he just used two closed nCloth balls inside of each other. It was actually quite an easy effect. The harder part was the umbrella, where he had to really stretch nCloth (which was brand new at that time). It was one continuous shot; the umbrella opens, gets covered by snow, blown by wind, hit by rain and finally torn by hail. The “wetdown” by the rain was another interesting effect. We basically rendered the scene two times, once normal and once looking wet. Then with the help of particles, we made a mask to blend from one to the other. The snow is classic particles, the snow on the umbrella is geometry, simulated with rigid nCloth. The smoke are fluids and the batter is again RealFlow Fluids.
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| The Area:
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Can you please tell us a bit about Swisslotto and the Sandoz commercials.
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| Dany:
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Swisslotto was one of the jobs that just slipped through. Nitin, a friend of mine (an industrial designer) modeled the whole thing, I made the animations and hit render. Well almost as easy ;-)
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Sandoz was difficult for its effects, especially the head cracking had to be done 3 times until it looked good. It needed a lot of pieces, a lot of manual work and a long simulation. The texturing part took quite long as well. We had around 5 weeks time and two weeks of those I was in Tokyo, shopping, going karaoke and having lots of fun, while my friends had to work :-)
| The Area:
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Okay for the Sandoz calcium commercial, I have to ask - where did those two swords that the skeleton was threatening with go to when he disintegrated into dust ;-)?
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| Dany:
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You're the first to ask that! They are actually on my desk now :-)
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| The Area:
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Which version of Maya are you currently using? Do you have any custom proprietary tools/plugins in maya - if so, can you tell us about it?
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| Dany:
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We use Maya 2008, tring to migrate to 2009 slowly but some of our tools have to be adjusted. We have a proprietary Database with an AJAX front-end to organize assets and shots.
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Then there are some python based tools like an eLoader and eSaver with which, you can load and save scenes without worrying where to put them so other people can find them.
There's still lots of customization to do for us to become more efficient. We'd love to go with a standalone renderer in the not-so-far future.
| The Area:
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Now about Elefant Studios - why the name Elefant?
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| Dany:
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Oww, it's a nasty story we came up with one of those long nights out at a bar. You don't want to know ;-)
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| The Area:
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What is the future for you guys and where would you like to take the direction of Elefant Studios to - any plans for expansion, or "some investor involvement" ;-)?
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| Dany:
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No investors, I like how things are. No big expansion planned either, we want to take things slowly as they come. I definitely want to work more on our pipeline. Because it's our own firm, we can really go where we as artists want, and not some guys that put the money in it.
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| The Area:
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With the tight-knit CG community in Switzerland, is there still high competition amongst the studios there?
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| Dany:
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Actually, not really. We see the competition outside Switzerland and we are happy if the jobs stay in Switzerland, because often times they go to Germany, England or other EU countries. The quality is often not very high in Switzerland, so the production companies are a bit skeptical doing jobs in Switzerland.
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| The Area:
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How is the general perception and support for 3D in Switzerland - are there schools and programs that are available for training? Is it a respected profession?
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| Dany:
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Unfortunately, often not really. Many here think it's a hobby we do. Maybe it's because we like what we do. Clients are sometimes asking for unrealistic things in an unrealistic time frame and budget. It can be done, but not with the quality we would like to deliver.
There are no good 3D schools in Switzerland, there are some general courses for starters, but I'd recommend people to either go abroad or if you really want to stay in Switzerland, to attend an art school and learn the technical side of things yourself. It's the easier part of 3D anyway.
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| The Area:
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What's cooking in the oven now? We saw that one of your contracts involved Mini John Cooper Works.
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| Dany:
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Oh, that was really just a small print job, nothing else coming up with Mini. We might do some Visual Effects for a feature soon, mostly compositing though, but I'm really looking forward to it.
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| The Area:
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Well, we thank you for taking the time to share with us your work and experience, all the best from us all here!
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| Dany:
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Thanks AREA, it was a pleasure.
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| Posted by Jasimjawahir on Sep 06, 2010 at 01:49 AM
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| inspiring work :)
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| Posted by Mohamed Almonajed on Dec 05, 2008 at 12:08 PM
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| Dany,Simply you're incredibly GENIUS.
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