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Archive notice: This article was originally published on September 1, 2018. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The idea of realising a creature pin-up calendar had been buzzing around in director Christian Leitner’s head for several years. At the time, Christian was completing his bachelor’s degree in Salzburg, and unfortunately he didn’t have the time, the team or the necessary expertise to realise the project with the desired quality. In all the years in which the project lay dormant in his mind, it continued to develop: initially, the artist wanted to create his own figures. Over time, however, he realised that the humour of combining monster creatures with the world of erotic photography would be all the greater if he used iconic characters from well-known films.
Twelve calendar creatures
It was not easy for the Film Academy team to decide which creature candidates would make it into the parody pin-up calendar. The criteria for selection were: Recognisability, difference and an anatomy capable of striking pin-up poses. Among the twelve creatures that are allowed to adorn a month in the final calendar are King Kong, Predator, the Transformer robot Bumblebee and the Goblin King from “Lord of the Rings”. This character was even given the leading role in the accompanying behind-the-scenes film “Creature Pinup”.
At the start of the project, the Film Academy team only planned to realise the calendar stills. The students also approached the supervising professors with this plan for the approval of the diploma project. After a few weeks of pre-production, however, it became clear that a clip was needed for a wider reach and for advertising purposes. Initially, a running time of eight seconds was planned for the advert, but this was extended to one minute in the course of the process, which led to an increase in the team and required a very precise calculation. The team realised both projects, the twelve still motifs and the film, at the same time, which in retrospect was also the biggest challenge for the students. This meant they couldn’t really focus on just one construction site. “When we worked on the teaser for a long time, we had the feeling that we weren’t making any progress with the calendar. One of the two always felt like it wasn’t getting enough attention,” recalls Christian. The student team received expert advice from the Film Academy on the legal issues involved in using such well-known Hollywood celebrities for the calendar project. As the project is a parody, the use of the intellectual creations of others, as in this case, operates in a kind of grey area. The Film Academy therefore authorised the use of the figures, but the calendar could not be released for sale and was limited to a quantity of 100.
Preproduction
Film stills from the respective show and illustrations from the corresponding art books were primarily used as reference material for the design of the characters. The initial plan was to place the creatures in their actual environments. However, after colouring these concepts, the students were certain that the effect the team wanted to achieve would be missed. So they distanced themselves from this approach and tested out how close to the original pin-ups the characters could be designed and at what point it became too much. Christian comments: “This step showed us that the question of style still needed to be clarified. Because the calendar had to be sexy, erotic, stylish, but also funny.” The right amount of vanity and eroticism was found using photo references from various fashion magazines. Using these templates, the students created a few overpaints of the previous concepts – after which the team was ready for production.
Modelling the CG photo models
They started with the less elaborate creature models that didn’t require an RnD phase – those without fur, hair and excessive individual geometries, such as King Kong and Bumblebee. The main creature from “District 9” was the first in the modelling process. Predator was the last character chosen: “At the end of the project, we needed a character we were sure of for the planning. This allowed us to make up for lost time,” says Christian. ZBrush was primarily used for the modelling. “As we were able to divide the tasks such as shading, lighting, rigging and animation optimally between the team members, I concentrated entirely on directing, modelling and texturing. I also got support from Kiana Naghshineh for the directing,” says Christian. When modelling, the artist tried to create as much symmetry as possible and then pose the characters. As no rigs were made for the characters, which would have allowed for beautiful skinning, the poses had to be modelled from scratch. Due to the tight time frame of ten days per 3D model, the team decided to realise the retopology with the ZRemesher. “This process didn’t provide the best edgeflow, but since the final product was stills, this way was a perfect solution to stay within the time frame and keep the models renderable,” explains Christian.
Bumblebee already gave us a queasy feeling in the pre-production phase. This is because the Transformer is defined by many individual parts and clean geometry, which threatened to blow up the ten-day schedule. The solution to the problem was kitbashing: “We only modelled larger and design-critical elements ourselves. For objects that only served as filler objects, we used existing geometry, in our case the “Ultraborg” kitbash by Vitaly Bulgarov. This allowed us to keep to the schedule and put our uneasy feelings to one side,” recalls the director.
Texturing
To keep the texturing efficient, Christian created rough colour and spec maps in Mari. These were loaded into Maya in the shading scene by Kiril Mirkov and provided with various adjustments. This quickly gave Christian a look development of the respective character that came close to the reference images. The artist then brought the customised textures for the details back to Mari, with the Transformer, Groot and the alien character requiring no or minimal texturing.
The basic setup of a character consisted of Vector Displacement, Bump, Colour, Roughness and Specular Maps as these already worked very well with procedurally generated maps.
The procedural texturing step was a great help, as it allowed details to be created in the maps right from the start, which were then edited during the shading process while the look was being determined. “This worked surprisingly well in many areas. In the end, the entire photo studio for the film was created directly in shading during look development, and all the associated assets, apart from a few footprints of the character on the floor, were created without a single texture. This saved me a lot of time when texturing,” says Christian. The Transformer also benefited enormously from this process, because its metallic surface lives primarily from the scratches, dents and unevenness. Without any hand-painted textures, the robot could be brought to a very good visual level with some procedurally created masks such as curvature shaders and noises. In terms of texturing, the Goblin King was one of the most complicated characters, recalls Christian: “The more a character tends to have human features, the quicker the viewer recognises flaws, making the character seem unbelievable. His many assets, such as his crown, loincloth and staff, also made the process more tedious.”
Please move!
The decision to use the goblin as a film actor was made due to his great changeability. Seeing the dirty, scary Goblin King transform into a sexy, erotic pin-up queen promised the greatest comedy. Another point was his resemblance to a human character, making it easier for the viewer to bridge the gap to a real-life pin-up model. As the team decided in the pre-production phase to use this character for the commercial, more time could be invested in its realisation and the model could be made production-ready with a clean edge flow and a skeleton and muscle rig.
To ensure that the goblin moved as realistically as possible in the film, the team did a reference shoot with an actor. Unfortunately, the actor’s movements could not be fully transferred due to the mass of the cave orc. The filmed clip nevertheless provided a good basis for the timing of the cuts and the camera movements, but the animation of the CG creature was ultimately the animators’ own creation.
A rig for the king
As only the Goblin appeared in the teaser film, only this character needed a rig. Rigging artist Lisa Schachner used the auto-rigger as a basis, which was updated with various setups, so that the animation could be started as early as possible. The facial rig was created with 75 specially produced blendshapes, which made it possible to achieve a wide range of emotions. The reference shoot also provided a good basis for this. Especially for the close-up shot at the beginning, the team was able to orientate themselves very well on the material shot. “As we already knew what facial expressions the character should show in the clip, we were able to reduce the work on the blend shapes to the expressions that would actually be seen. In order to achieve more dynamics in the face, tweaker controls were created in addition to the shapes,” explains the director.
The next step was the deformation rig, which used a total of 96 individual muscles to create a believable skin deformation. NCloth was used for the simulated elements such as the chin, stomach and breasts: “That was a bit of a challenge because nCloth is not really designed for fat and muscle simulations. In the end, the simulations were included in the final geometry using a wrap deformer and a blendshape. The fast and extreme movements, which were distributed over two long shots, did not exactly simplify the simulation work. However, after the simulation was customised for the shots, everything worked very well in the end,” says Lisa. The muscle rig was used for the still pose of the orc. Afterwards, the team tweaked the geometry in ZBrush.
Light and magic
The lighting of the characters was mostly done in Maya – exceptions were the Alien, Groot and Smaug, who were staged in Houdini. The main light source used was the Arnold Quad Light, which, in combination with the Arnold Light Blocker, allowed almost any lighting scenario to be set up. An additional HDRI was also used in a few scenes. The Transformer benefited enormously from this due to its metallic nature and reflectivity.
Houdini was used for both the calendar and the teaser film: David Bellenbaum used the software to realise dust particles in the air, the drool drops during the goblin scream and the destruction of the studio screen. The artist also used Houdini to make the cable, which vibrates when he screams, vibrate. To do this, David initially created VDB-based velocity and signed distance field volumes from the goblin animation, which influenced all the simulations. The cable was animated in chops and the vibration strength was painted onto the mesh using a weight map. He simulated the destruction of the screen using a combination of an FEM solver for the fabric and a bullet solver for the metal part. The position of the required constraints could be created via attribute transfer using the distance between the two elements. Since Maya does not recognise points from Houdini natively, David created the particle-based dust parts in space with procedurals and played out random geometry as alembics. After some compositing tests, it turned out to be most efficient to render only the particles with depth of field.
For the Smaug character, the team used Houdini in combination with Arnold for shading and distributing the thousands of small cubes. For Groot, it was also used for the shading as well as the moss and leaves. Thanks to the procedural text
turing made it possible to generate an anisotropic wood structure with Houdini support, which followed the sculpted shape of Groot.
Rendering was done exclusively with Arnold in combination with MtoA under Maya and HtoA under Houdini. “Both our team and our other colleagues at the Film Academy were already very familiar with Arnold. When problems arose, we were guaranteed to find someone who had a solution. Arnold is also very clear, offers top performance and quality and has a very good community,” says Kiril Mirkov, who was primarily responsible for shading the characters.
Pin-up future for the monster team?
After completing the diploma project, most of the team members very quickly started working in the VFX industry, so unfortunately they were unable to take the time to make many festival submissions or think about further utilisation. “We’ve already talked about making our own calendar with creatures or other characters, or perhaps realising something completely different together. For now, however, we just want to let this project rest, enjoy the positive feedback, but are of course also happy to accept criticism,” summarises Christian.
