Welcome to SHAPE!
Get ready to immerse yourself in the world of character creation for feature animation films.
I designed this course with a clear goal in mind: to empower artists like you to bring their characters to life using a professional, industry-standard workflow.
This course is taught in French, but English subtitles are available for all lessons to make it accessible to a broader audience.
What makes SHAPE unique?
This is the first course of its kind—comprehensive, versatile, and specifically tailored to 3D character creation for cinema.
Drawing from my experience working on numerous feature animation films and projects, I’ve crafted a program that provides a deep, nuanced perspective on the entire process—from initial concepts to the final face rig.
With SHAPE, you'll follow a hands-on, interactive approach. Each lesson is designed not only to teach but to inspire, encouraging you to push your creativity further.
SHAPE is divided into 3 key modules:
Advanced 3D Modeling in ZBrush
Master the skills needed to create clean, appealing, and stylized characters ready for a 3D production pipeline.Advanced Character Retopology
Learn how to retopologize your characters for easier rigging and surfacing. This module also dives into technical modeling elements like inner mouths and eye sockets.Advanced Face Rigging and Blendshapes
Explore the techniques used by top animation studios to rig character faces. You’ll learn:Setting up a robust face rig from scratch.
Painting weights for joints and combining them with blendshapes.
Using DPK_BCS, the blendshape manager plugin widely adopted by studios like Illumination Mac Guff, Mikros Animation, DNEG, Framestore, and others.
Integrating deformers for squash-and-stretch effects.
Beyond that, you’ll gain insights into the manual setup process—connecting controllers, ordering deformers, creating shapes, and navigating advanced workflows. These are techniques rarely taught in schools or seen in studios, where automation often hides the underlying setup.
Who is SHAPE for?
SHAPE is not an introductory course for ZBrush or Maya. These are the tools we’ll use, but you’ll need at least a year of experience with one or both to follow along comfortably.
The course is divided into three standalone modules Character Modeling, Character Retopology, and Face Rigging/Blendshapes. You can choose just one module or opt for bundles to access multiple or all modules together!
SHAPE is my most ambitious project yet.
My hope is that it helps countless artists master the art of character creation for feature films. Let’s bring your characters to life together!
Please, do not share the content of the course, it's strictly personal, each person who want to access to the content needs to buy it, thank you for your understanding.
And I also just wanted to thanks Felix Ferrand, CEO of Stim Studio, which was my mentor in facial rigging / blendshapes, I learnt a lot with him, and he also fought really hard with a lot of big studios such as Framestore and Dneg in order to install DPK BCS in over there in some feature animation productions.
He really did a lot for the face rigging field in this industry and for me.
I look forward to seeing you in the course!
