Jacques Isaac started the animation "Conscience" in Softimage 3D, as a final project at the University of Paris.  Jacques completed some of the animation, but has now finished school and is working in Spain, with the ambitious project still unfinished.  The story of an intelligent robot interested Jacques because it was an opportunity "to talk about metaphysics, reality and dreams."

Jacques had two years of art classes at his university before beginning the project, and started with sketches of the designs for the projects, followed by storyboards and an off-line previsualization, before beginning the 3D animation.

Texture mapping started primarily with scanned photographs, and extensive Adobe Photoshop work to process them into suitable texture maps.  The lighting relied heavily on inclusive lights to selectively control illumination, simulating "something like radiosity" in following where light should bounce in the scene.  Image processing to the rendered image further refined the lighting, contrast, and color.

The head of the robot was initially built out of NURBS, based on digitized front and side view drawings, but later components were converted to polygons to optimize the polygon count and continuity (when he was working in Softimage with no continuity tools.)  In the end, he used the rounding tool on some of the low-res polygon meshes to complete the smooth-looking model.

The partially-completed animation is now seen only on Jacques's demo reel.  He hopes to "move to a major company (BlueSky, ILM, Digital Domain, BUF, etc.)" and work on visual effects for film.  He has no web site at the time of this writing, but can be reached by e-mail at isaac_jacques@hotmail.com.