Archive for the ‘Film Animation’ Category
Sign Of The Times
Just watching the Golden Globes awards there, and the Best Animated Feature award was announced with the preface that the nominees’, (Wall-E, Bolt and Kung Fu Panda), collective box-office income amounted to the impressive half-billion dollars. That’s the same sum GTA4 took in just its first week – I guess kids just don’t have that much money any more.
Brendan Body’s Bat Bike Bonanza
Check out these initial pre-vis tests for the Dark Knight movie’s Batpod, done by my old college buddy (and fantastic animator), the equally fantastically named Brendan Body.
One of my most enjoyable parts of game development is the pre-visualisation stage preceeding pre-production. It’s when your imagination can run wild before the harsh realities of real development take hold. I find the animator in a strong position here as complete sequences and gameplay scenarios can be mocked up without any need for a programmer.
ILM On Building Iron Man
Just sneaking in before then end of the year, here is the second and far more comprehensive talk I attended at the earlier ADAPT conference. Happy new year everyone, et bonne année tout le monde.
Industrial Light & Magic: Building Iron Man
Marc Chu – Animation Supervisor
Beginnng with his history, Marc joined ILM in 1994 and has since then served on 20 films, perhaps most notably as Animation Lead on “Pirates of The Caribbean” character Davy Jones. As Ironman was Marvel’s own first fully self-financed feature, they had 6 different companies competing for VFX work. It was interesting to see that despite its reputation, ILM must still compete for bang-for-buck value as film studios are keen to shop around. It comes as no surprise though, that the work was won in part on the back of the impressive Transformers work.
To this end, he showed a rough animation test of Iron Man taking off done over the course of two weeks. ILM has plentiful archive footage from which it can draw resources, and for this piece air footage repurposed from Ang Lee’s Hulk was used to create a high-quality flight sequence.
Disney: Locator-Driven Morph Targets
OK, back to business. The first of two sessions from ADAPT 2008 – members of the Disney team working on incoming CG film Bolt talk about their road to enlightenment regarding an intelligent solution for driving blendshapes to maintain a high quality of deformation on a character lacking clearly defined limbs and a neck area. Of note, TD Hide Yosumi was actually a former member of SquareEnix, having worked on Final Fantasy X and the Disney-collaborated Kingdom Hearts series.
Walt Disney Animation Studios: Building A Hamster Named Rhino
Clay Kaytis, Philippe Brochu & Hidetaka Yosumi – Lead Animator, Lead Modeller and Technical Director for the character Rhino.
This presentation could easily be split into two parts, with the first concerning the solution achieved to maintain model fidelity in a character that could easily move between biped and quadruped movement, and the second on their general deformation solution for all areas of body/limb movement.
Beginning with an exclusive new trailer, the speakers began by describing the requirements of the rig which required the dual functionality of quadruped rodent-like movement and bipedal anthropomorphic acting. The character Rhino was described as essentially a ball of fat covered in fur that exists primarily inside a hamster-ball. While the ball-rig setup may have proven an interesting topic enough, with the TD writing special software for this alone, it proved enough of a challenge to overcome the transition between 4 and 2-leg stances.
Beowulf Mocap Postmortem
It’s certainly some time after the event, (it’s slow going when you’re in the middle of a full production), but I’ve finally collated my remaining notes from this year’s Game Developers’ Conference that relate to animation and characters in games. So to start off, we have the head of R&D on last year’s landmark film featuring virtual actors, followed by a trio of Japanese developers giving insight into their approaches to animation and character development.
Sony Pictures Imageworks: A Believable Character Postmortem: Motion Capture on the Virtual Set of BEOWULF
Parag Halvadar – Lead R&D Engineer
Hailing from the same studio that created Monster House, Halvadar’s talk concentrated on facial motion as that’s a recent topic for games industry. As is often the case with movie industry approaches they couldn’t directly be recreated for use in a game development situation, but nonetheless provided an interesting insight into some of the lengths that must be gone to in search of the (some say, false) holy grail of truly photo-real virtual characters.
Pixar Technical Notes
I just discovered this nice little treasure-trove of technical notes from Pixar covering animation and rendering topics used in their film productions.
As ever, we can’t directly use anything from film in our games due to the huge discrepancy in rendering times (30 frames per second vs 30 hours per frame), but they do appear to be leaning towards shortcuts for hair that avoid complete simulations.
Fantastic Imagination
Jurie Horneman, (Champion of the recent Manhunt 2 credits fiasco), has posted links to several galleries displaying animation of Eastern European origin. I don’t know about North America, but these kinds of disturbing and unsettling images were all part of growing up as a kid in Europe, especially a kid interested in animation.
Lately I’ve been hunting on the internet for some of the more obscure feature-length animations I soaked up at a young age and repeatedly came across the work of the late René Laloux, creator of Fantastic Planet, Gandahar and Time Masters (shown above) among others. I’d highly recommend looking out for any of these – there’s something about classic European fantasy, (and absent from their Western counterparts), that takes the imagination to a somewhat more unsettling yet provocative place.
Speaking of the West though, I did find a similar tone in Ralph Bakshi’s Fire and Ice. Of interest is the fully rotoscoped approach taken by the film that not once conflicts with the cartoony visual style – something quite encouraging in these days of motion capture.
Layers of Pixar Polish
The final Adapt Presentation Notes Session, providing information for animators regarding character and rig development, peer-review processes and general acting tips.
Pixar: How Pixar Animation Studios Brings Characters To Life
Andy Schmidt – Animator on Ratatouille
This was an incredibly valuable lesson in the workflow for polishing an animated feature, which has some lessons we can directly employ for our own peer-review processes. The initially self-deprecating yet entertaining Andy Schmidt took us through the challenges of creating the characters for Ratatouille, (namely, how to turn vermin into an appealing character) before moving on to Pixar’s general approach to taking a scene through various levels of polish.
The biggest element of the talk that struck me was the difference between an animated film and videogame cutscene schedule – two supposedly similar projects in concept, with the key being when voice-over is recorded. Below is a comparison between Pixar and what is my experience of the norm for large-scale videogame project storytelling, taking a direct comparison with only the elements shared across mediums.
Transforming Thousands
Now a smaller note-taking session, a result only of the vast amount of content on show so as to keep one’s eyes away from the notepad.
Industrial Light & Magic: VFX Used On Transformers
Todd Vaziri – VFX Sequence Supervisor for Transformers
One of the most entertaining presentations of the week, due to both Todd’s upbeat yet humble attitude and the sheer multitude of videos displayed during the presentations, ranging from multiple render-passes highlighting the various explorations of lighting and materials on the robotic protagonists to behind-the-scene shots of the film plates throughout the various layers of post-production layering.
Incredibly heart-warming were the animation renders illustrating the sheer amount of cheating going on when characters went off-screen. With the original brief requiring 14 robots in total, they scoped for only 14 transformation animations, but ended up creating over 140 due to each transformation being created specifically to sell the particular shot. Some examples shown had Transformers’ legs going through the ground, various parts scaling into the body to be hidden away, even bits flying off only to return just at the moment they were required on camera – just like our cutscenes!