Archive notice: This article was originally published on March 1, 2019. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Lucky is, as his name suggests, a happy pig. He lives with the little girl Mara and shares everyday life with her: Lucky fetches sticks, sleeps in her bed and greets her at the garden fence after school. Until one lunch changes everything. As the film was produced for PETA, the use of real animal actors was out of the question: a photorealistic full CG pig character had to be created. Mackevision was responsible for this in all shots. During filming, director Nathalie Lamb acted as a real interaction partner for the child actress, for example in the kitchen.
To be able to portray the emotional film plot, the CG pig had to be an “emotional creature” that looks photorealistic and shows a wide range of emotions. The creation of a full CG character that plays a leading role was a first for Mackevision. The team therefore built a new character pipeline based on Maya, thereby expanding its portfolio once again. In total, a team of 34 VFX artists worked on the film, which was realised in around 4 months.
Collaboration with the Film Academy
Mackevision was commissioned to realise the film via director Nathalie Lamb and producer Veith Unger, who are both studying at the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy. The duo presented their idea concept at a PETA competition and won. Veith then approached three VFX studios, one of which was Mackevision. In the end, the team from Stuttgart was awarded the contract. “We were able to work closely with Nathalie and Veith on the conception of the VFX shots,” explains VFX producer Francesco Faranna. “We were particularly involved in the storyboard, the scenes and the character portrayal and advised them on the extent to which it was possible to combine efficiency in terms of the realism and realisability of the piggy and the story in terms of empathy.”
Lifelike piggy
The 3D model is based on a Zsphere in ZBrush. Based on this, the artists used Dynamesh to define the proportions and initial characteristic features. They then created the retopology in Maya for a clean edge flow. “We then brought the low-res version of the pig back into ZBrush. We used displacement to avoid symmetries and added details to the model using alphas and various brushes to create the most realistic surface possible for the look. This included, for example, individual curled hairs, special skin folds or dirt that clumps the fur in places. Multi-tile UVs were used to transfer the sculpted details to the low-res model via displacement maps. The final mesh ultimately consisted of around 20 million polygons,” says character designer Christian Leitner.
The rig and the animation were added in Maya. The final animal skeleton has 150 bones, and its muscles, connective tissue and fat layer also correspond as closely as possible to the anatomy of a real pig. “To achieve this, we studied drawings and books,” recalls Emanuel Fuchs, CG lead on the project. Once the skeleton, muscles, fascia and fat were modelled anatomically correctly, they were combined in a separate simulation file for the creature FX. Emanuel explains: “When the initial animations were ready, we transferred them to the simulation and simulated muscles, fat and skin using the Maya plug-in Ziva VFX. In this way, the skin was placed over the muscles and fibres and simulated, creating the effect of so-called skin sliding and resulting in the most realistic deformation possible. We increased the performance of the simulation by combining some of the deeper muscle and skeletal groups that are not visible on the surface.”
The team started rigging relatively early so that the animation could begin as quickly as possible. The difficulty here was to enable the model and rig to be updated while ensuring that existing animations were preserved. “As we had to adjust the ratio of realism and cuteness of the piggy as the project progressed, parts of the model were subsequently adapted several times,” says the CG lead. The realisation of these update processes and the seamless replacement of the model in existing rigs were feasible thanks to the pipeline set up by Mackevision. “It was important to us to build the rig in such a way that it could do a lot on the one hand and offer the animation artists the best possible performance on the other. We had to visualise an edible pig that still evokes empathy. Of course, a cute little piglet would have been easier, but that wasn’t possible due to the storytelling.”
Another challenge was the many slow-motion scenes. “Pigs usually move very hectically and quickly. It’s complicated to depict the movements realistically, even though they are decelerated. To ensure that we were still able to reproduce the movements almost perfectly, we watched numerous reference videos and repeatedly compared them with our animations,” says Emanuel.
The shading ran parallel to this process. Subsurface scattering (SSS) played a very important role for the pig skin. “That’s why we split the rendering into several channels,” explains the CG lead. “This allowed our compositors to adjust the intensity of the SSS and give us feedback – which we were then able to transfer to the shaders.”
Backgrounds
There was a rotated plate for each shot with the pig, so full CG backgrounds did not have to be built. However, the team added some additional elements digitally, for example to allow the digital character and background to interact or simply to create a more beautiful image. Emanuel recalls: “On set, we always used photogrammetry to create a 3D image of the respective scene. The CG elements that were added afterwards included little sticks, a cosy blanket, dirt tracks and digitally created grass that adapted to the pig’s movements and kicks.”
More piggy films?
Following the successful realisation of the PETA film, Mackevision would now also be prepared for the realisation of a feature film with Hero CG characters. VFX producer Francesco Faranna comments: “With our pipeline, we can realise the animation of a wide variety of individual characters with different anatomies as well as the animation of crowd scenes, i.e. crowd simulations. We are prepared for everything: from close-ups of organic creatures with simulations of muscles and hair to complex animatable hard surface creatures such as robots.”
Of course, Emanuel is still working on the pipeline: “Optimisations are planned in the area of simulation. We want to push performance here so that we can achieve even better results even faster.”
Other recent character projects from Mackevision include the recently completed advertising film “#ThrillUpYourBeast” for the client Apollo Tyres. For the project, the Mackevision team created a hybrid panther and motorbike character. “This was the first time the character pipeline was used in a hard-surface context. It was exciting that we were able to supplement the pipeline with our experience in the automotive sector. For example, the pipeline allowed us to combine our established workflow for lighting and shading in 3ds Max with all the advantages of creature animation in Maya,” says Francesco.
