Archive notice: This article was originally published on July 3, 2009. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Our Wonderful Nature
by Tomer Eshed
Magnificent animation using Hollywood film techniques satirically: action like “The Matrix,” rapid cuts, and bombastic music. In just five minutes, “Our Wonderful Nature” tells of two water shrews fighting over a coquettish female - and therefore for romantic happiness and reproduction.
621 (film/short film), HFF “Konrad Wolf” Potsdam-Babelsberg, Tomer Eshed, Dennis Rettkowski, Stefan Maria Schneider, Jan Schneider, David Ziegler - Maya, Photoshop, After Effects, Shake, Final Cut
Sharp Mice in a Matrix Fight
“Our Wonderful Nature” was created at the Konrad Wolf University of Film and Television in Potsdam as Tomer Eshed’s intermediate-degree film. The animated film reveals the mating rituals of a water shrew in a way they have probably never been shown before.
After two years of production, the film was completed in February 2008. During the first year, research was carried out, production design refined, and modelling, rigging, and animation completed. In the second year, the final look was developed, the film rendered, and sound and music produced. Autodesk Maya, Pixar RenderMan, and Apple Shake were used during production.
The Idea
The protagonists’ behaviour and appearance are based on real water shrews, but they were altered sufficiently to fight on two legs and use human facial expressions. Rather than being produced with a conventional storyboard, the film was animated spontaneously shot by shot, with the documentary section based on original references and the fight entirely invented. Many design sketches served as templates for the subsequent fight choreography. The character setup repeatedly had to be expanded with new functions to realise new ideas. In parallel, production designer Jan Schneider worked on the set design, based on a typical Central European river landscape. The greatest technical challenge was creating a credible, naturalistic environment, an essential element of the film’s concept. It became clear early on that the film would require abundant detail, fur, and elaborate camera effects. Dennis Rettkowski was Technical Director and responsible for finding suitable solutions to these various technical challenges.
The Characters
Following initial tests with Maya Fur, it was quickly decided that Shave and a Haircut would be the more practical alternative, particularly with later RenderMan rendering in mind. After guide curves were modelled, they were exported as RIB files, RenderMan’s scene-description format, using a combination of custom scripts and the RenderMan connection for Shave and a Haircut. Because the number of hairs required in close shots was sometimes very high, another custom program divided the RIB files into many small files, loaded only when actually needed. At this stage, the hairs were also given additional attributes for later shading. The standard Shave and a Haircut hair shader was expanded with effects including translucency and scattering.
Because water shrews are very small animals, subsurface scattering forms an important part of the shading. The RenderMan implementation, which collected lighting information in a prepass and filtered it in a further stage, proved extremely reliable.
The Environment
The set geometry consists of two, sometimes three rows of modelled plants, stones, mushrooms, and branches in the foreground, several textured cylinders in the background, and the ground. Moss was also distributed throughout the set, with growth controlled by texture maps and its geometry, approximately 2GB, divided into many additional files in a similar way to the hair. The plants were animated through scripts simulating wind dynamics. Because converting such quantities of geometry can take a very long time, several hundred frames were exported as numbered file sequences and reused like an image sequence.
Small plants on the ground that came into contact with the figures were animated using simple Maya deformers. Credible plant translucency was achieved by scanning leaves both front-lit and back-lit. Depending on the light direction, the appropriate texture could be selected. The ground presented a particular challenge because camera moves showed the set both as a whole and extremely close up, requiring the detail of a 128k map to avoid texture interpolation. Because that size was unmanageable, we developed a solution blending different resolution levels while using image segmentation to avoid soft or washed-out interpolation. To create the required photographs at different detail levels, the earth-and-moss set was rebuilt on a traditional animation table. Photographs with different light directions enabled us to generate shadow-free colour textures and displacement maps. It quickly became clear that the characters needed more interaction with the ground than simply casting shadows. We therefore developed a solution using Maya’s 2D fluid simulation and a specially made displacement shader to simulate displaced mud on the ground.
Lighting
Because the set’s size and level of detail meant the virtual sun’s shadow maps needed a resolution of at least 4k and often 8k, it made sense to calculate them as rarely as possible. A RenderMan light shader was therefore developed that combined static background shadow maps with frame-by-frame shadow maps for the figures and a projected shadow pattern making the world appear smaller. Further benefits included higher foreground-shadow resolution and selective use of deep shadow maps supporting transparency and motion blur. Because the film takes place outdoors in daylight, simulating indirect or scattered light was indispensable. The environment-light shader developed for this used a similar approach to the cast shadows. Occlusion information for all static objects was baked once into 2D textures. Occlusion for all dynamic objects was calculated frame by frame. The environment-light shader combined both sets of information.
Compositing
The rendered images were already very similar to the final ones. Motion blur and depth of field were rendered entirely by RenderMan. Compositing merely added several volumetric effects such as god rays and dust particles, together with lens flares and flying sweat. Creating the god rays was the most complex task. They were realised through a Maya script that exported the sun’s position, projected onto the image plane, to Shake, and a special render pass producing the required light and shadow information.
Sound Design and Music
The sound layer was another important aspect. Because much of the film takes place in slow motion, elaborate transformation of every sound element was required. Work on the sound tracks began at the start of the second production year. They were designed and mixed by David Ziegler. In parallel, Stefan Maria Schneider worked on the film music, which consists of full orchestration, recordings of a women’s choir, and digital percussion.
