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.

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.

Read entire post…