Andrew Bolton wanted to showcase a 1988 haute couture jacket by Yves Saint Laurent in one of the exhibition's room. A marvelous piece inspired by Vincent van Gogh's 1889 painting Irises that took embroidery atelier Maison Lesage, 600 hours of handwork, 200.000 beads, 250.000 sequins in 22 colors, and 250 meters of ribbon.

I got asked to make a digital twin of that jacket because the 3D scan that we had was not detailed enough. I'm really greatfull that I accepted this challenge because the outcome is probably one of the most beautifull thing I ever made! But where to start?

1. The first step was to place the beads, sequins and ribbons. I found this archive video of Mr Lesage talking about the process of making this jacket, we can see at around 1:22 min one of the embroidery panel in wip, this give the first clue on how to approach the reconstruction. I've developed some tools to help me placing the beads and sequins. Once everything was placed, the jacket look too perfect and CGI, it needed some chaos.
2. So I went true a phase of simulation where I made all the individual beads and sequins colliding between each others. The ribbons were treated as cloth simulation.
3. The materials of the jacket were made in Redshift by my colleague Dylan Da Silva, who also made the buttons.
4. It was finally time to render but Redshift didn't really like the 78 millions of polygons, every frames where taking 5-10 minutes to load before rendering. After a final phase of optimisation using proxy geometry the load time went down to just 5 secondes. I was time to press render!