A knight seldom comes alone – “Knight Rust”, the cinema film

Published on 13 March 2014 by Mirja Fürst. The Topics are: Unreal Engine (513)

Starting signal: Entries can be submitted for the animago AWARD 2014! The DP shows you which entries have been shortlisted in our competition in recent years, including a making-of.

A green cartoon monster next to a blue robot character, both with large expressive eyes.

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Archive notice: This article was originally published on March 13, 2014. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.

Gabriele Walther, Managing Director of Caligari Film- und Fernsehproduktions GmbH (Letters from Felix, Princess Lillifee, Moon Bear) secured the rights to the popular children’s book series “Ritter Rost” by Jörg Hilbert and Felix Janosa in 2008. Up to this point, Caligari Film- und Fernsehproduktions GmbH was mainly known for detailed 2D productions and wanted to bring a computer-animated film to the cinema for the first time.

And that was not all: “Ritter Rost” was to be shown in stereo 3D on the cinema screen. From the very beginning, it was important that the cinema film should not look too different from the children’s books. This meant that they did not want to produce a photorealistic animated film. The same applied to the many small figures and living objects in the Knight Rust world. As a result, “Ritter Rost” became one of the first computer-animated films in Germany to feature well over 150 different moving figures, all of which had to be rigged and animated.

And that was just one of the many challenges during production. Gabriele Walther and Caligari Film- und Fernsehproduktions GmbH were responsible for production management together with Marius Mohnsson and Traffix Entertainment GmbH. Production was carried out at M.A.R.K.13 in Stuttgart under the direction of Holger Weiss. A-Film from Copenhagen was also brought in to set up a production pipeline to control and coordinate the more than 80 minutes of film that had to be produced at various stages. This also required an exchange between the director in Munich, the studio in Stuttgart and IBT Studios in Bonn, which was responsible for the compositing, and each company had to be given permanent access to the current data.

The look

As the look of the books was to be retained, it was decided that the characters should be modelled, rigged and animated in three dimensions and given a toon shader with lines of varying thickness during rendering. However, as the film was produced in stereo 3D, numerous tests were carried out right from the start to ensure that the shaders did not look too flat and that the characters were given a little more depth in addition to the generally familiar animated lines. That’s why the final look of the film doesn’t look like you’re looking at a bunch of cutouts, but characters and backgrounds show depth in addition to height and width.

You get the impression that you can reach out and touch them. But it wasn’t just the shaders that were given attention to such details, but also the textures. As the individual objects were rendered with drawing lines at the end, it was of course not possible to use photos as a basis for the textures, and so each texture for each object was drawn by hand, or rather with the Wacom tablet. Here, too, the original templates from the Ritter-Rost books were closely adhered to.

The modelling

The Ritter Rost books are known for the fact that the objects look a little worn and old and are therefore covered in dirt and rust. The world of the knight consists of many individual metal plates. Even the sky, the clouds, the sun and the moon are made of riveted metal plates, some of which are rusting. This look and the details were to be preserved during the creation of the film. As the film is also shown as a stereoscopic version in 3D cinemas, all the rivets holding the individual metal plates together, for example, were not simply drawn as textures, but were modelled piece by piece and duplicated as 3D objects.

Due to the accuracy of the 3D programmes, it can happen that the objects that have been duplicated are particularly noticeable to the viewer, as one object looks exactly like the other and the images appear too perfect. For example, the viewer sees a brick house in which every brick has the same size, the same circumference and the same texture. This gives 3D films an unrealistically clean and boring look. Even in the real world, there are many unevennesses that are not directly visible but are part of the environment. In order to prevent the world from looking too perfect and therefore surreal and to give the viewer the impression that all objects have simply been duplicated, the modelling of the objects has often been altered a little. The edges were made slightly uneven, the 3D objects were given dents and different sizes and many different versions of the rivets were also created to maintain the look of the books.

As the shaders also created cartoon lines for the most part, hardly any procedural textures could be used and all objects had to be created individually. In the case of a parquet floor, for example, a surface can be modelled and textures, normal maps and specular maps create the impression that you are looking at a parquet floor consisting of individual panels. This was not possible with “Ritter Rost” and so each individual panel had to be modelled. And not only that. Because everything was riveted, each panel needed a bunch of rivets for the edges. All of this meant that the backgrounds were given an unprecedented level of detail and the memory in the computers was utilised to the maximum. Proxy backgrounds with less detail had to be created for the animation so that the computers did not become too slow.

The rigging

The riggers also faced a huge challenge. In the books, in addition to the main characters, there are always a bunch of objects such as cups, screwdrivers, clocks and lamps that can move and have a life of their own. Normally, animated films have around five to seven main characters and a few supporting characters to liven up the scenes a little. In addition to the main characters, “Ritter Rost” had around 50 supporting characters, up to 20 of whom can be seen on screen for longer periods of time.

In addition, the picture was constantly enlivened by objects such as clocks, coffee machines, cups or mugs, which were called “living props” in the production, so that the film consists of crowd scenes most of the time. In addition to these scenes with living props and characters, there were also real crowd scenes in which entire knight fights and spectators or Hollywood-style battles are shown. For the rigging department, this meant that around 150 characters and living props had to be rigged within a very short space of time, hardly any of which corresponded to the others in terms of size or width, or even the number of arms and legs.

Everything was available, from the 16-eyed spider to the one-wheeled robot or the two-headed dragon – and a customised rig had to be built for everything. To accomplish this task, the characters were divided into groups so that they roughly matched in terms of the number of arms and legs, eyes, structure and size. Various autorig scripts were designed and written so that arms and legs could be created automatically with FK and IK rigs. The result was around 30 to 40 different rigs, which were constantly revised and improved by the riggers until the end of production and moved by the animators. The Rigging Department also had the difficult task of supervising the mass scenes, some with over 100 characters, and getting them to render.

The animation

The animation team for “Ritter Rost” consisted of three lead animators, each of whom supervised a group of 3 to 4 animators. For many animators, “Ritter Rost” was their first feature film production and was a real challenge with the many different characters and the high output. The output was around 12 seconds of animation per animator per week and this figure had to be adhered to so that the film could be released on time. You had to adapt to the new rigs every time and also give each character a certain style of movement.

Ritter Rost, for example, is a character made up of an old recording machine and car parts. Accordingly, he was supposed to move a little more snappily and could also be animated a little more roughly. However, what works for a kind of robot did not look realistic for the human characters made of flesh and blood and disrupted the flow of the animation. So the human characters had to move fluidly in the usual and familiar way. For the living props, tests were carried out again and again if there was time, because a welding machine with a gas cylinder runs completely differently to an alarm clock or a cup. The animators tried out walkcycles to liven up the image without distracting the viewer.

The rendering

The shading, rendering and lighting turned out to be particularly difficult, as the film had to have the two-dimensional look from the books, but also function as a stereoscopic projection. The characters could therefore not simply be shaded flat and given black outlines, but had to show subtle, three-dimensional features such as highlights and shadows to give them a little mass. In addition, the black lines were not allowed to vary in thickness and thinness during movement, as this would be particularly noticeable and distracting in the stereoscopic projection. In order to prevent this, and also to avoid having to render each scene again and again, previews were first created to see where there would still be problems with the rendering. This reduced the rendering time to an acceptable level, as there was not much time before the various layers were transferred to compositing.

Within three years, an innovative children’s film was produced which – and this is unusual for such a well-known and popular brand as “Ritter Rost” – is not based on a story from one of the numerous books that have been published, but for which a completely new, approximately 85-minute-long story was written. The musical elements, some of which children can sing along to, have also been incorporated into the film. Children and parents are guaranteed not to be bored by this 3D spectacle, but will have a lot of fun with the story about the “brave” knight with his damsel and his adversary Prince Protz.

Click here for the colourful world of Ritter Rost.

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