Archive notice: This article was originally published on July 10, 2009. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
In the “Best Still” category, Portugal’s Miguel Ângelo created an intimate snapshot of Ernie from Sesame Street. Among other tools, he remodelled the colourful Jim Henson puppet from the 1970s using 3ds Max and immersed him in digital bathwater. What will Bert say?
“Oops! He Did It Again - Bath-Time Fun with CG Ernie”
For most of us, childhood days with carefree hours watching Sesame Street on television are probably two or three decades behind us. In the “Best Still” category, Portugal’s Miguel Ângelo puts Jim Henson’s cult character Ernie in the best possible light and runs the digital bathwater.
Like many other children, I spent my younger years watching “Sesame Street” or “The Muppet Show” in the afternoons after school. By contrast, many children’s programmes today are computer-animated and no longer possess the former charm of lovingly crafted puppet animation. Alongside paying tribute to Jim Henson’s body of work, the aim of my project was to transfer a character from Henson’s tangible universe into the digital age. I chose Ernie, or “Egas” as we call him in Portugal, as my colourful photo model because, alongside Cookie Monster, he is one of my favourite Sesame Street performers.
The starting point for my work was therefore to rummage through my old toy box, research on the internet, and obtain the Sesame Street DVDs that had finally appeared in digital form.
First Steps - Modelling
I used Autodesk 3ds Max and Pixologic ZBrush for the modelling. I started from scratch and first experimented with polygons. I also adjusted the clothing contours and proportions in ZBrush. The accompanying screenshot shows a wireframe of the objects from 3ds Max.
Lighting Effects
The image shown illustrates the implementation of the lighting effects. The screenshot shows a render test with some settings from the light rig.
For the lighting, I used V-Ray together with a key light, a bounce light, and a rim light.
Textures, Shading and Visual Effects
Creating the textures required intensive use of various maps, including a procedural noise map for the unevenness of the puppet’s “skin.” I also used the normal colour map and carried out standard shading optimisation. After the modelling and texturing work, I turned to visual effects such as the steaming bath and Ernie’s hair. I used Sitni Sati AfterBurn for the fog simulation, while Dimension Design’s hairfx software helped create the hair.
Rendering and Compositing
As mentioned, I used V-Ray as the rendering engine. I created several render passes, including beauty passes for the character itself and the background. Additional passes were created for Z-depth, hair, steam, and bubbles, giving me greater control during compositing. After rendering, I combined everything and refined only a few areas of the image in Adobe Photoshop until the digital bath-time fun with Ernie was just right.
