BodyPaint 3D Textures The Golden Compass

Framestore CFC used Maxon BodyPaint 3D extensively during production of New Line Cinema’s “The Golden Compass”. The studio spent fifteen months creating the armoured polar bears and their environments. BodyPaint generated textures for the bears, armour, props, environments and digital doubles.

“Iorek, Ragnar and the other bears were textured with BodyPaint 3D and Photoshop,” says Framestore Lead Texture Paint Supervisor Daren Horley. “BodyPaint 3D was extremely useful when painting complex organic shapes such as Iorek’s worn, rusty armour.”

Viewing complete scenes with multiple objects allowed the team to judge how individually textured pieces worked together. Artists added wear marks where surfaces rubbed against one another.

Most backgrounds were conventional matte paintings. More complex locations, including interior and exterior views of Ragnar’s palace and the bears’ fighting arena, used full 3D geometry textured in BodyPaint.

BodyPaint had been part of the Framestore production pipeline since the 2003 “Sea Monsters” episode of “Walking with Dinosaurs”.

Horley says direct painting and review on 3D objects was important to the workflow. Projection Painting removed seams, while cloning transferred parts of one texture to another and allowed the cloned region to be resized.