Click here to view the embedded video.

While I can’t fault the animation, it would be nice to know if they experimented with removing the in-between interpolation to more accurately recreate the 2D feeling, as some charm is lost when the motion is smoothed out during the initial comparison they give. Regardless, I’m sure the studio’s consistently endearing characters come through in the story as much as in these great visuals.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You know your artform is maturing when even homages are becoming part of pop culture – especially when the BBC picks up on this. It’s worth watching ozzy Simon Cottee’s pixel-art documentary referenced in the article – I’d never before considered the comparison between pixel-art and pointillism.

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.

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.

The Suit Model

The talk continued with Marc taking us through the various versions of the Iron Man suit, which were farmed out to seperate VFX houses. The Mk I was handled by Vancouver studio The Embassy, with the Mk II (above) by The Orphanage. Stan-Winston’s Studio was drafter to create the full non-CG suit, with the traditional approach of working on small maquettes to reduce costs.

From this base, ILM built the fully working Mk III suit in Maya, showing tests to demonstrate difficult rigging areas such as around the pelvic area. 44000 photos and 1100 quicktime movies were gathered for reference, and interestingly Marc displayed Photos as frames in .mov files for ease of access. These photos contained everything possibly having to be referenced or recreated in CG.

As part of the CG suit creation process, the team would make daily turntable renders to compare to the real Winston models and compared shaders to real iron balls. Regarding this, around 6 different damage materials needed to be created for the suit at various stages throughout the movie.

Chu admitted that Iron Man’s flight was based on Star Wars Snowspeeder movement, though initial air-brake test concepts were weak – based on an idea of the hero being some kind of “Samurai In The Sky”. Of interest, many of the initial movement tests were done by the suit modeller, whom one assumes must have been rather multi-talented, especially after we were shown the depth to which Iron Man’s endoskeleton was fully detailed and modelled.

Some Mk III suit modelling stats:

• 1,900 Individual Objects
• 872,000 Polygons
• 3756 Texture Maps
• 483 Rigging Nodes

The Animation

The film featured lots of “Digital-Double” shots, same for cars & jets etc. ILM made continued flight tests on their choices of air shots, with Chu admitting that the relationship between the VFX team and the Director had never been as highly collaborative as this before, with the Director asking animators to provide ideas for shots. Sometimes entire shots were created to match ILM test renders.

For the final battle with Ironmonger, ILM had to redesign the back-piston rig to avoid crashing when he moved, with Marc demonstrating some excellent keyframed walk-cycle tests. On the set, actors interacting with Ironmonger traked a low-tech “head-on-a-stick” for eyeline reference. At this point he mentioned it was more difficult working on live-action plates due to the numerous limitations such as predefned locations where the character’s head must be placed.

Perhaps the technological highlight of the talk was the section on ILM’s proprietary iMOCAP technology that allows the motion-retargetting of CG assets using just the filmed plates, avoiding the requirement for motion-capture suits. This method was used primarily to allow actor Robert Downey Jr. to have the bulky MKIII suit added back on in CG in some instances where the real-life suit would have proven too resticting.

Surprising for a humanoid super-hero, only 4 shots in entire movie used real mocap. With the tally of CG shots as thus:

• 409 CG shots, of which…
• 289 were 3D animation, comprising…
  • 254 Keyframe Animation
  • 29 iMOCAP
  • 4 Mocap

Director Jon Favreau’s summation of the hero’s movement was, “Superman takes off fast and lands slow. Ironman takes off slow and lands fast”. With this in mind, ILM had to show a visible improvement to character Tony Starks attempts at taking off throughout the movie. We were shown jet-blast tests done over a still photo, (to create an easy looping sequence), with Chu remarking that this area proved a challenge compositing all the flare VFX.

As I’d been previously informed at Giant Studios, the team mocapped an actor in a wind tunnel with his feet tied together to get an idea of how Iron Man might perform during flight, but in the end this proved useful as good reference only. Of note, the actions during air flight used FK animation only – a change from the typically IK-based rigs ILM use in Maya.

The last part of the talk focused on the machine Stark used to build and don the suit, the “Suit Machine”. This effect required a tremendous amount of work to create, and was notable mostly for the technique of recreating the background set digitally. By capturing many photos, taken in multiple exposures, ILM created a single 360 degree shot of the set – placed on sphere like a videogame’s skybox. All shots during this sequence used this virtual background, with the Suit Machine (and Iron Man) rigged by another multi-talented indivdual, a Transformers animator that did some of the most complicated shots of that movie.

Suit Machine modelling/rigging numbers:

• 15461 Objects
• 3,980,000 Polygons
• 1825 Texture maps
• 2284 Rigging nodes

In summary, the project totalled 400 VFX shots over the course of 3 or 4 months, though when pressed at the end on a shot quota at ILM, Chu explained that there is no quota in the traditional sense, and the studio never rushes animators, taking time to get each shot right. As such, one presumes they have banks of animators waiting to pick up the slack when schedules slip, as he described the practice of bringing on extra people before deadlines etc. Overall, Iron Man had 15-20 animators over the course of production.

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.

Initially, tens of steps of deformers were employed to handle the transition which required the character to undergo a variety of transformations such as rotating the head 90 degrees to face front once standing, however all these corrective tools slowed down the rig somewhat. As is something of a standard now, the team began putting the model through its paces by forcing it into many poses and drawing on top what should be the corrections made to fully realise them. However, difficult posing not ideally suited to the rig cause further corrective work on the modellers’ side downstream, and more importantly caused the animators to treat the rig somewhat conservatively with less-adventurous animation.

At some point towards the end of pre-production, a decision had to be made whether to change the rig to better support the animators. This required a new way of approaching the modelling/animation workflow for Disney studios, eschewing the previous linear progression of modelling->rigging->animation-> in favour of a much more versatile circular progression under the banner of the “character team” where each area has buy-in at every stage, much like agile development. The name given to this month-long process was affectionaly termed “Rhino-Palooza”, and it’s success spawned similar “palooza’s” for every other major character.

As the aim was to share only one rig for both pedal stances, the solution was to to simply morph the character model between ideal quad and biped topologies, allowing for a smooth transition between running and standing even during motions. This is essentially the same method employed in High Voltage’s Xenomorph XNA demo in 2004, and was overshadowed by the clever solution to the second problem posed by Rhino’s body.

With such a short neck, arms and legs, in order to fully realise Rhino’s mandate of “a ball of fat covered in fur” the team had to come up with a new system for using corrective chapes to intelligently deform the character. To this end, they improved on Disney’s own PSD (Pose Space Deformer) system that applied morphs for every major movement to maintain character model integrity. PSD is an in-house tool at Disney that directly talks with Maya’s skin-clusters.

Unlike many game-engine limitations, Disney’s animators are free to fully animate bones using all the areas of translation, rotation and scale, and most importantly are free to break the rigs as they please. As such, animators are able to get the most out of any character without fear of affecting the final result downstream, but this also means that traditional methods for employing corrective shapes do not always come into effect.

The old method of creating a shape for each an every rotation value (eg, x,y & z for the neck) did not take into account actions that were animated with scaling of the bone or even breaking it via translation, and creating shapes for each value would have resulted in far too many shapes than would both be realistic to maintain and would likely slow the rig to a halt. Additionally, simple actions like leaning the neck into the shoulder might cause the fat to bunch up there, but if the shoulder was already down the fat shouldn’t squash up at all.

The elegant solution they finally arrived at was a sytem of locators positioned on the low-res character mesh whereby, rather than using simply bone rotation values to drive keys on morphs, instead measured the relative distance between two or more relevant locators to decide if a morph should be blended in. Interestingly, the team actually found that results were increased as they reduced the locator-count and fine-tuned the driven-key inputs.

This system is a much more robust approach to the familiar driven-key morph-target and, (as were are moving closer to employing driven-keys in realtime game engines), sounds like a good method to investigate – should one ever have the chance to work on a game invloving a small number of high-resolution characters.

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.

The first portion of the talk involved simply tallying the vast amounts of data, equipment and effort used in the production:

• 260 Vicon MX40 cameras were used synchronously to record motion.
• Body, facial and hand motion were captured simultaneously.
• An Electro Oculograph (EOG) was used to record eye-tracking.
• 20 actors could be captured simultaneously.
• Actions were captured in a 55x55x25ft volume.
• 81 actors were tracked over the course of the movie.
• 4 horses.
• 1 pony. (Only one?!)
• 46 days of shooting.
• 250 props made and captured.

The second portion detailed the methods required to bring the faces to “life”. It must be said that, despite often firmly entrenched in the Uncanny Valley as is always the case with attempts to simulate realistic facial motion, Beowulf has done the best job yet at providing real glimpses of coming up the other side. The tallies continue:

• 4 layers of face rigs.
• 3D facial models did not match actors faces in a 1:1 ratio, (Ray Winstone in particular), causing lots of marker-swapping.
• Adhered to FACS (Facial Action Coding System), to recreate all the muscles of a human face, totalling around 60 facial expressions (including head motions), with 16 different phoneme shapes.
• Face poses were created from combinations of weights of a smaller set of basic poses.
• Motion-capture values were run through a script to find the closest match with the facial expressions and were replaced with blendshapes.
• The EOG recorded horizontal and vertical eye movement, saccades and blinks via and eyepack on back with electrodes by the eyes to detect eye-muscle movements.

It should be noted that, while in my opinion the face of Angelina Jolie was the most successful and consistent in quality throughout all shots involved, Halvadar explained that hers was the scan that was deliberately adjusted the most to form an exaggerated impression of how we picture her, backing up my belief that realism is simply just not realistic enough when it comes to artistic endeavours such as this. This was also apparent in the scene of her naked, gold-dripping body emerging from the water – something which he felt the need to show several times over and was also manipulated drastically due to her pregnancy at the time of shooting.

In closing, it was most interesting of all that Halvadar’s decision to show each scene step-by-step revealed that every shot only achieved the final visual quality after a final pass was made by an animator working with video reference of the original scene, begging the questions as to why go to the bother of all the technicality when that process could be done from scratch with presumably similar results.

If absolute realism in games still is your thing, then you may wish to investigate the work of George Borshukov at EA and his Universal Capture (UCap) method. Proven in The Matrix trilogy and Tiger Woods tech demos this really is something to watch, especially since its optimisation for real-time implementation.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

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.

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.

Pixar Animated Features – Videogame Cutscenes

Story Story
Script Lighting (Often unchanged from the level’s default)
Voice-Acting Storyboard
Storyboard Animatic
Pre-viz (Character placement, Cameras) Script
Animation Blocking Voice-Acting (Temporary in-house VO)
Animation Polishing Animation Blocking
Add Simulations (Skin, Cloth, Hair etc.) Voice-Acting
Add VFX Animation Polishing
Lighting Add VFX

Additionally, the four VO and Animation segments in the videogame timeline often contain a loop as the VO is reworked due to the script often being in flux – this unnatural workflow is every bit a by-product of not locking down the script early in the project, which is something our industry really needs to take strive towards.

Notes on Pixar character development:

• Each character was given a signature movement style to differentiate themselves from one another, this is something that would be great to explore with a game containing only a few diverse characters, as game animation is often diluted to facilitate sharing among multiple characters.
• Much research was undertaken on both rats and the cooking world, with the team joining a local cooking course and live rats brought in to the studio and hooked up to a web-cam. This unfortunately offered nothing more than lots of footage of sleeping rats, so old favourite the BBC Motion Library proved invaluable for rat movement.
• Among the many character-development sketches on show were what Andy called “Mechanical Sketches”, where the artist would envision how the skeleton rig might be placed inside the characters – something that is clearly considered at every stage of the process.
• Extremely finished paintings were created over the top of in-progress models to provide early lighting/material tests.
• Pose character sheets were devised to illustrate various correct-vs-incorrect methods for animating the characters – essentially style sheets setting a brand bible for each character.
• A decision made late in the character-development process to begin the movie with the rat characters walking on all fours necessitated a complete rebuilding of the character rig to allow optimum animation for both biped and quadruped motion.

Notes on Pixar rig development:

• As soon as the first rigs are created, vast amounts of animation tests are performed to try and break them when pushing characters to extremes. Similarly, facial rigs are run through calisthenics animations to push the expressions as far as they can go. At this stage, many character-defining walkcycles are also prototyped. Of interest, the walkcycles were completely symmetrical, pointing towards Pixar having a tool or method to quickly facilitate this.
• The animators work closely with the riggers and modeling department during the creation process. At the self-declared risk of sounding arrogant, Andy described the animators at Pixar as being the “vehicle” for telling the story, so modelers etc. bend over backwards to support them.
• One example of communicating change requests to modelers involved notes drawn over screenshots to illustrate the exact changes and improvements required.
• Animation tests would be created to test the reach of each character, therefore defining how some scenes might play out. The example shown highlighted a rather large chef’s inability to move in close to the kitchen-top, therefore necessitating additional collision deformation on his body.
• Similar tests are performed to find how far cloth and other dynamic elements of a character’s person could be pushed. It was interesting to note that by this stage the models were already fully complete in design.

Notes on Pixar animation style:

• Squash & Stretch is an integral part of their animation style.
• Many Pixar animators come from a 2D only background, including the speaker, as animation is seen as interchangeable between mediums. In my own experience, hiring good animators without any 3D experience has always proved fruitful, undermining perceived difficulties within own industry of hiring animators that have experience in Maya over Max and vice versa.
• Andy strongly recommended Ed Hooks book, “Acting for Animators”. Attendeding one of his lectures I also found it to be quite insightful, basing much of his observation on a character’s centre of mass defining his movements, as well as useful ideas concerning what goes on outside of a scene you are animating determining what plays out inside it.
• Andy went back to basics and displayed some inspiring examples of bouncing balls he’d found on the web. Noting that John Travlota begins every new character by creating a unique walk for him, Andy moved on to various walkcycles of his own creation, moving from realistic to highly stylized to illustrate how to promote caricature.
• Next, he showed a selection of admittedly rough though long character tests created to explore how characters might hold kitchen objects based on video research. These long tests would later prove useable for background characters in the final movie.
• Facial tests were also performed by matching frame-for-frame against movie clips of actors used as inspiration for the creation of the Pixar characters.
• Finally, “Lineups”, where all the major characters were lined up side by side performing actions in a brief scene, were created to explore consistency.

Notes on Pixar review process:

• Shots are divided out among animators almost like a casting process depending upon their particular strengths, such as humour, timing, caricature etc.
• Peer review is paramount, where showing in-progress shots for advice from the rest of the team is consistent in “Dailies” meetings, though it was not clear if this was mandatory. This is something essential to maintain, (and increase), quality among any group of animators, though a weekly assembly should suffice.
• The Director, in this case Brad Bird, uses a laser-pointer to highlight areas for work on the projector screen, though a video showed him to be incredibly animated when illustrating his comments – despite appearing to micro-manage the acting.
• A lot of, (but not all), Pixar animators shoot their own animation reference – this is sometimes sped up to fit better with the cartoony style.
• Their test renders for review, just like the Halon ones, were done with black bars at the top and bottom containing information such as the filename, version number, date, frame numbers, camera info and state, eg. blocking, polishing etc.
• In summary, it appeared the motto was to rework, rework and rework again to achieve the levels of quality Pixar is known for.

Finally, while most videogames unfortunately still rely on text and exposition, Andy finished his talk with an educational section stating that “Theatrics” should be used to tell a story without the viewer noticing, breaking this into the following insights.

• “You can say a lot with key-posing”: Mentioning storytelling poses, Andy informed us that you can really nail a scene in one pose. This is best illustrated in paintings, but he also showed some extreme poses from sports press that really showed more motion than many animated sequences. He advised to “sneak extreme poses” into animations to really sell a movement, using a scene from The Jungle Book as an example where Mowgli’s head is literally buried in his ass when climbing a tree. I myself have noticed rig-destroying examples like this being used to great effect in the Dead or Alive series of games to really accentuate attack motions.
• “Playing an action until something happens”: A simple observation to never have characters idle without at least something appearing to be going on in their heads – something not easily avoidable in videogames unfortunately.
• “What’s happening vs what’s really happening”: Basically, what is the scene really about? This idea centres around layered character motivation affording a vehicle for more interesting dynamic between characters where secret motivations allow acting on two levels – that of what the other characters know and of what the audience knows.
• “What does your character want? What do they do to get it?”: Another motivational observation, though this time a more general rule about character actions defined by their needs and what they do to achieve them.
• “What happens to your character isn’t as important as what you feel about it”: Essentially a separation of the events playing out around your character and how they choose to react, allowing the story to focus more on the characters themselves rather than what events take place for a deeper more human storytelling experience.