Project Genesis

Chasseur de Tornades is an attraction at Futuroscope for which, at Digital District, we created the entire audiovisual experience. Viewers are immersed in a nearly 5-minute, fully CG short film, broadcasted across giant screens forming up to a 360° field of view around the spectator.

I joined the Tornado Hunter project at the end of the pre-production phase. The layout was close to being finalized. It had been built in Blender to allow for fast iteration alongside the director. However, given the technical constraints of the attraction (rendering in 360° cylindrical format at 10K resolution) Blender was no longer sufficient to meet these requirements. Before moving on to the film’s FX work, my first task was to develop tools enabling parallel work between Blender and Houdini, by building an export/import bridge between the two software packages.

At the time, Digital District did not yet have an official pipeline, and the scale of the Futuroscope project made it impractical to proceed without one. Together with Jekhiel Boyer, we established Digital District’s first production pipeline to support this project. Building on the folder structure already familiar to Digital’s artists, we adapted it to enable proper asset organization and tracking.

Tool Development

With a preliminary pipeline in place, I was able to continue developing the Blender export tool, ensuring that each asset would be computed and stored in the correct location.

Once assets were correctly exported into the pipeline, the Houdini import tool made it significantly easier to locate each element and assemble the scene.

Finally, we also imported the camera made in the Blender layout in order to recreate the cylindrical camera within Houdini.

Beyond the tools developed specifically for the Futuroscope production (the Blender/Houdini bridge and the cylindrical camera setup), I also created several workflow and rendering optimization tools that are still in use at Digital District today, including a texture relink tool, an asset cleanup tool for export, an automatic material library linker, a Redshift instance creation tool, and a wedging exporter for .rs files.