many iterations we did, but I remember doing
some scenes over and over, slowly but surely
setting the style of the project.”
With the story originally split between five
scenes — The Flower scene, Farewell, The Island,
Sea and New Land — the decision was made to
make it more concise. The sketching of style-
frames to establish moods and colours, then
shadowed development of 3D prototypes, which
revealed exactly how ‘tricky’ emulating Moebius’
style would be for browser-based rendering.“
“Once we were happy with our sketches and
overall visual direction we started to design the
scenes. At the same time, we quickly set up our
cameras and very low poly elements for the
developers to start building up the structure of the
experience. The 3D process had been a back and
forth workflow that gave us headaches more than
we would admit. The intention was to start building
the scene with very low poly scenes, then model
assets in a separate file and, one by one, replacing
the low poly ones with the final ones.’
“After replacing those, we would export the
assets and directly paint on them using powerful
software called Substance Painter, which allows
designers to directly paint on 3D models. The
last part would be to animate the elements
with the texture on it and hand it over to the
developerteam.”
OPTIMALOPTICS
The two main challenges were to respect the look
and feel of the original design while bringing life to
complex scenes involving lots of different animation
techniques. An in-house engine called NanoGL has
been heavily customised by makemepulse to
provide that very ability to quickly prototype effects
and animations. “The main goal here being able to
combine and reuse those effects in order to speed
up integration process of assets,” explains lead
developer Pierre Lepers. “Almost all elements in the
scenes are rendered using the same modular
material which acts as an empty shell in which
various modifiers can be added to obtain the
render we want. Two categories of modifiers are
involved; effects and deformers, with the former
letting us control the actual rendering of elements.
The base colour came from a texture, a solid colour,
vertex colours, or more complex procedural effect.”
“For each case, the appropriate effects can be
added and combined without having to rewrite
specific GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language) from
scratch. The same way that we can add cel-shading,
paper grain, outlines and colour correction on
per-object basis.”
The latter uses the same modular system, and
would let the developers combine deformation
effects on meshes, be it for skin, morph targets or
procedural animations — such as wind effect on
vegetation, spline deformation for the flowers etc.
“It sounds really technical and deep, but it’s the
kind of stuff we do at makemepulse,” enthuses
Ughetto.“Wehavetomakethingsin themost
optimisedwaypossibleaswewantourexperiences
tobevisibleonalldevices.Thegoalofourteamis
tomakemagic,creativeideaspossible,andthat’s
whatwehavetriedtoachieveagainonthisproject.”JOURNEY’SEND
According to Louis Ansa’s own recollections, the
final weeks of Nomadic Tribe’s three-month
production were intense. “The core of the
experience was there, and we were so deep into
the project that we had to focus and remind
ourselves to try to take a step back to see the big
picture and prioritise tasks.”
Time was growing short, with everyone keen to
add further details, small interactions and polish
things over and over. The team had to sacrifice on
some details to focus on the compatibility of the
experience. “That’s why we spent the last twoweeksworkinghardonmakingthemobile
experiencesmooth.A lotofthe3Dmodels,
interactionsandinterfacesweresloworjustokay,
so wepushedit furthertoupgradetheexperience
andbringit ashighasthedesktopone.”
Thatattentiontoperformanceis exemplifiedby
momentssuchasthebirdsscene,inspiredby
HayaoMiyazaki’sStudioGhiblifilmSpiritedAway.
Garneringparticularpraisefromthecommunity
sinceNomadicTribewentlive,theteamemployed
similarmotiontricksheretoillustratespeedinan
epic,exhilaratingwayoneverydevice.“Ourtarget
audiencewasverybroadandwemadethe
experienceeasytousefora bigvarietyofusers,”
Ansaconcludes.“Morespecifically,wearetalking
to thedigitalagencies,studiosandtalents.Wehad
a verywarmwelcomefromeveryone,andit wasa
hugesuccessfortheteamaspeoplefoundit
poeticanddifferentfromtheactualtrends.”TRIBAL QUEST
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