Table of Contents Show
Archive notice: This article was originally published on March 15, 2017. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
As every year, entries from the fields of 3D animation & stills, visual effects and visualisations will be sought, and an animago AWARD will be presented in eleven categories. The young talent award is endowed with 3,000 euros by DP. Participation is free of charge and projects can be up to three years old. You have until 31 May 2017 to submit your entry.
You can register here and submit your entry or several entries.
Create lots of 3D entertainment on your own
To give you an idea of the cool people who regularly take part in the animago AWARD: Thomas Zeug and his two aliens, for example. The creative motion artist has been single-handedly realising the online series “2 Aliens” in his spare time for many years. In 2016, this earned him an animago nomination in the “Jury’s Prize” category for the episode “Vier Fäuste gegen Terror Station” (Four Fists against Terror Station), certainly many new fans of the show and a making-of in DP issue 01:17.
One-man show with C4D
At some point, the big science fiction fan Thomas Zeug asked himself: “What does everyday life actually look like for aliens in their UFO?” – and the animated series “2 Aliens” was born. It took 5 years to create the pilot film “Proll Out“, during which time the artist was able to learn a few tricks to speed up the production of an animated film with a running time of 53 minutes.
A new 30-minute episode is now produced every year or so – “Four Fists Against Terror Station” is already episode 4. The project is a homage to the action cinema of the 80s and 90s: full of shoot-outs, cool lines and lots of explosions. The gang of villains in “Four Fists Against Terror Station” is peppered with the typical clichés of the action hero genre and some of the characters are modelled on their real-life counterparts.
Action cinema homage
For part 4, Zeug wanted to imitate the classic visual feel of well-known Hollywood productions more than for any of the previous episodes – to do this, he (once again) worked his way through a few old Van Damme, Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis films and made a note of everything that caught his eye in terms of special features in the lighting, camera movement and colour design: hard edges of light, falling backgrounds, detail shots and pigeons in slow motion are recurring elements that the artist then incorporated into the episode. The artist is also very proud of the design of the poster for the series episode; Zeug achieved the typical graphic style of old film posters with several filters and a lot of manual work in Photoshop.
Pipeline
Much of the project is improvised and realised with the simplest digital means, but this is what makes the style of the series so special. The artist created the 3D animation for “2 Aliens” with Cinema 4D and realised the compositing with After Effects. Editing was done with Premiere, the audio editing was done in Audition. Thomas Zeug’s hardware is equipped with a 6 x 3.3 GHz Intel Core i7 processor.
Forward planning & parallelism
Even during the production of one episode, Thomas Zeug is already thinking in detail about the next one. Although the rough plot and the framework story are already in place for the entire season, the exact elaboration, including script development, only takes place very close to the actual production – so that spontaneous ideas can still be incorporated.
During the preparation phase, most of the new characters are modelled and rigged and the locations are built. As the artist works alone on “2 Aliens”, he starts working directly in the 3D software without previously created concepts and tests out initial ideas for the plot of the respective episode in the environment.
Movement for villains
For “Four Fists Against Terror Station”, the terrorist villains in particular had to be recreated. Cinema 4D’s sculpting and bodypaint tools were used to model them – this allowed 10 different characters with their respective characteristics to be created from a raw model of this “species”.
Thanks to the C4D-internal Cappuchino module, movements of individual limbs of the characters could be recorded with the mouse and further processed. In this way, an initial rough animation was created for several body parts one after the other almost in real time, which provided a practical and quick basis for further animation, especially for pure dialogue scenes.
Zeug used a specially developed Xpresso circuit in C4D for the mouth movements of all the characters: in conjunction with the integrated sound effector, this allows the opening of the mouth to be controlled via the waveform of the individual voice recordings. In addition, lower frequencies trigger the mouth positions for “O” and “U”. The elimination of lengthy mouth animation has greatly increased the speed of production, but was no easy task, especially with the very unusual mouths of the terrorists.
Rendering
To save even more time, the artist rendered the first scenes directly in parallel after a preview rough cut and refined them in compositing. The lighting and rendering were realised with the standard Cinema 4D tools and the normal Advanced Renderer without Global Illumination. The film look typical of the genre was achieved by rendering the episode directly in widescreen format instead of the usual 16:9 aspect ratio. The strong depth of field required for this was added using the Frischluft depth-of-field plug-in Lenscare for After Effects, while Thomas Zeug used Red Giant’s Magic Bullet Looks for the final colour correction.
Faking volumetric effects
The asteroid field in which the terrorists’ station is located should be hidden by a lot of dust and fog. However, actual 3D smoke simulations on this scale would have exceeded the performance and capacity of Zeug’s computer. So in the end it was simple photos of clouds that filled the asteroid cluster in several nested layers. Together with some turbulent displacement from the TurbulenceFD plug-in for After Effects and lighting effects from Trapcode Shine, the result comes relatively close to a real volumetric calculation.
Challenges
The large number of figures in some scenes within one image also pushed Cinema 4D and the hardware to its performance limits. The problem was solved by splitting the scenes into individual projects with only 2 to 3 figures each and only copying them back together into one shortly before rendering. In addition, low-poly proxies replaced the terrorists during animation, which were replaced by their final versions during fine animation.
Plans with the two aliens
Thomas Zeug would like to produce the series full-time and with his own team, for which the right funding must of course be found. Until this plan materialises, however, the artist is looking forward to the maximum creative freedom that comes with working on it as a hobby.
Thomas Zeug is particularly grateful to all the people who have influenced this major project in some way so far: Florian Linckus, for example, whose music perfectly captured the desired mood of this film. And, of course, all the voice actors who lent the 3D artist control of their voices to match the 3D characters for a short time. “And of course I would like to thank my great role models in action cinema: Actors, directors, scriptwriters and co. … to list them all would simply go beyond the scope of the film!” laughs Thomas Zeug.
(Mirja Fürst)
