This article by Sabine Hatzfeld originally appeared in DP 03 : 2015.

For the film project “Le Gouffre”, Thomas Chrétien, Carl Beauchemin and David Forest quit their jobs, formed the Lightning Boy Studio and moved in together for cost and production reasons. A Kickstarter campaign brought the animated film with the unusual look to completion, which was nominated for an animago AWARD in the “Best Short Film” category in 2O14.

The trio met in 2006 at the Canadian college “Cégep du Vieux Montréal”(www.cvm.qc.ca). Carl Beauchemin and David Forest studied 3D animation, Thomas Chrétien 2D animation. In the third and final year of their studies, they decided to work together as filmmakers in the future. Thomas went on to complete a two-year 3D degree programme, while Carl and David gained their first experience in the industry.

After six months of developing the story, production finally got underway at the beginning of 2012 – despite all team members now working full-time. Carl and David worked as 3D animators at Modus FX on the first Canadian 3D feature film “The Legend of Sarila”, while Thomas worked as a VFX artist for mobile games at Gameloft(www.gameloft.com). There was only time for “Le Gouffre” at night or at weekends. So after six months, all three of them quit their jobs to work on their film full-time and only from time to time. To save costs, they also moved into a flat. We spoke to Carl Beauchemin about the project, which was successfully financed via Kickstarter towards the end. The film and makingof have been online on Vimeo since February this year(bit.ly/1zgSovu and bit.ly/1zMo3C1).

DP: Hello Carl, why didn’t you consider a crowdfunding solution or funding opportunity right from the start?

Carl Beauchemin: Our original plan was to get a government grant. But when you make a film for the first time, nobody trusts you. Our application was rejected three times in a row. At the same time, we realised that no company would support us as long as there were no presentable shots. That’s why we abandoned crowdfunding. Without actually rendered shots, how do you hope to convince people that you can make a good film?

DP: What hardware equipment did your budget allow for?

Carl Beauchemin: Each of us still had a good computer from our student days – because of the 3D homework. We also had a special computer at our disposal: in 2007 David submitted an illustration to a competition organised by cgsociety.com – and promptly took first place! The prize was a Maingear Shift(www.maingear.com), which we nicknamed “the beast” and which lived up to its name in the rendering.

DP: How was your pipeline structured?

Carl Beauchemin: The lion’s share of the work – i.e. modelling, animation, rigging, VFX, rendering – was done in Softimage. We also used ZBrush for the detailed work on some of the models. Concept art and storyboards were created traditionally on paper or in Photoshop. The compositing was done in After Effects and the editing was done in Sony Vegas. We also worked with Slipstream VX from Exocortex, a plug-in for Softimage. We used it to implement every particle simulation that can be seen in the film(exocortex.com/products/slipstream).

DP: How were Previs and Animatics used?

Carl Beauchemin: They were essential parts of our workflow. We spent months working on the animatic. We wanted to make sure that the timing was right and that the storyline was coherent. With the help of the Previs, we were able to create a rough version of our sets to get an idea of the proportions.

DP: What inspired you to make this film?

Carl Beauchemin: “Le Gouffre” is set in an undefined location. We did look at pictures of canyons, but we didn’t copy them one-to-one, we changed the scale and adapted them to our desired film look. For the characters, we focussed on a timeless look. We left out details such as zips or logos so that the design didn’t come across as too modern. Our aim was to give the film a special atmosphere, comparable to a legendary tale.

DP: How did the unusual look come about?

Carl Beauchemin: We had a very specific look in mind and it took us a long time to realise it. In the end, we had to paint all the textures by hand and find a clever way to put the shots together. During this process, we realised that in order to create a unique visual style, we had to forget everything we learned about compositing in school. Instead, we looked for a way to do it all in Photoshop with layers and paint brushes.

DP: How did you actually realise this for the sets?

Carl Beauchemin: For the sets, we first unfolded the meshes with UVs to assign the textures in medium resolution everywhere. This allowed us to make sure that everything looked good and looked painted from a distance. Up close, on the other hand, it sometimes looked really bad, but that didn’t matter: in such cases, we took a screen capture of the set from the camera angle of the shot and painted all the high-resolution details in Photoshop. We also often quickly created a greyscale texture shader for rendering in order to get more details on a new texture. Then we just had to project the whole thing back onto the original mesh. Of course, this only worked if the camera panning was not too strong. Otherwise you would have seen that the projection was expanding in a somewhat strange way.

DP: How did you approach the look of the characters?

Carl Beauchemin: Because they were animated, we couldn’t use the same projection technique. Instead, we relied on good, hand-painted textures and lots and lots of passes. We had a separate mask for the head, hands, eyes and hair, as well as for each individual item of clothing. We treated each light as if it were a colour layer. So we selected the exact colour we wanted to use in the lit scene and assigned it as a solid colour instead of having the layer in an additional mode. That helped us a lot to get rid of that classic CG look.

DP: Did you actually consider using an inexpensive MoCap system for animation references?

Carl Beauchemin: No. Firstly, that was never our intention and secondly, our budget wouldn’t have allowed it anyway. However, we ran through all the shots ourselves and edited them into a reference real film. This allowed us to see whether the flow of the film worked. We always tried to place the cameras in the same way as in the animated film so that we could also test whether the cuts worked. But the biggest advantage of the video reference material is that you can see all the fine little movements. This allowed us to make the animation in the film look as real as possible.

DP: What challenges did you face when rigging the film?

Carl Beauchemin: We already knew how to rig in Maya. But as we wanted to realise the project in Softimage – the programme we mainly worked with after our studies – we had to learn everything from scratch. So the first character rig was quite a challenge. It took us a month to finalise it. But after that it was just a matter of repeating the same steps. We made sure that the same parts of the rigs had the same names for all the characters. This allowed us to transfer the animation of one character to another, which sped up production considerably. This mainly concerned movements such as running, cheering or sowing. To simplify the process of animating faces and fingers, we had Visual Panels at our disposal. This allowed us to select animation controllers quickly and intuitively. But our biggest challenge was the bridge. It consisted of over 70 duplicated individual parts, so the rigging had to be well thought out right from the start.

DP: Which ZBrush tools were useful to you?

Carl Beauchemin: We used the ClayTubes brush the most, which is great for refining details, especially when used in conjunction with the Smooth brush. The brush also behaves very similarly to the one we used in Photoshop to paint our textures. Other useful brushes I can mention are Pinch and Slash3, which we used to paint all the crevices and details of the rock face or the folds in the clothing. The Decimation Master also turned out to be a lifesaver. We often had to create high-resolution set elements in close-up at the last minute. This plugin helped us to export meshes that had a lot of detail but could still be rendered quickly. ZAppLink also proved useful in our painting process, as it allows you to seamlessly integrate image editing software – in our case Photoshop – into ZBrush.

DP: How did the work with Sony Vegas go?

Carl Beauchemin: This editing software was used for the entire editing process. We updated the edit almost every day. That was brilliant for keeping an overview. We always knew exactly what had already been done and what hadn’t. We stacked many video tracks on top of each other: 2D animatic, film references, animation captures and final renders. When we added a new clip, we could play the whole sequence to make sure everything ran smoothly.

DP: Which renderer did you use?

Carl Beauchemin: Since we didn’t have the resources to render complex shaders and lighting, we used basic shaders, mostly surface shaders and lamberts. All the details were in the painted textures, so we didn’t need anything more complex than that. We even faked the subsurface scattering in some textures, such as the ears of the characters. Rendering was done in Mental Ray, the default renderer in Softimage. The renderer did a good job and produced our frames at a decent speed.

DP: How long did the rendering take?

Carl Beauchemin: We rendered frames every night and at weekends – for over a year. I can’t tell you the exact number of hours, but it must have totalled around 15,000. We couldn’t use the services of a render farm for budgetary reasons.

DP: How did Kickstarter help you in the end?

Carl Beauchemin: This crowdfunding platform was our last resort – and our best decision during the entire project. We ran out of money in mid-2013 and were looking for ways to pay our musicians and sound designer. This meant that a campaign, wherever it was launched, simply had to work. One crucial point was that we already had followers. Not many, but just enough to reach a few hundred people who shared our Kickstarter page with their friends after the launch. One of our goals right from the start was to build a fanbase. To do this, we set up a production blog and published concept art, insider information and lots of tips and tricks that we had learnt from our work there every fortnight. At the same time, we filled our Facebook page and continually posted in various CG forums. After a year and a half, we had quite a decent number of followers. But it took a long time and a lot of effort to build up this fanbase.

DP: But at that point you were already able to show your first results.

Carl Beauchemin: That’s right, we were already very far along in the film production. So, fortunately, we were not only able to show a lot of shots, but also cut a trailer that caught people’s attention. It was also very obvious that we had already invested a lot of time, effort and money in this project. So the message was not: “Give us money so that we can realise our dream”. Rather, it came across that we had already done everything we could on our own. Now it was just about that little push we needed to complete the project. I think this approach touched people and helped make this campaign such a big success: With 711 backers, we raised a whopping 24,155 Canadian dollars instead of the planned 5,000.

DP: Looking back, would you do anything differently?

Carl Beauchemin: No, I don’t think so. The biggest problem for us was that we misjudged the time. It took us two years to produce the album instead of one year as planned. Looking back, there was no other way to achieve the quality we wanted. Basically, our naivety and enthusiasm were an advantage. Because if we had known beforehand that it would take two years, we might have waited a few years until we had more money together. One of us would probably have changed our minds and decided to call the whole thing off. “Le Gouffre” probably wouldn’t have turned out like this if we had waited longer.

DP: What’s next for you?

Carl Beauchemin: The film has finished its festival run and is now online. It has been incredibly well received and we couldn’t be happier. From the beginning, our goal was to get the attention of people working in the film industry. We wanted to show what we can do as a team. We hope that this project will lead to new partnerships. As Lightning Boy Studio, we want to develop and direct projects. However, we are keen to work with other studios that take on the administrative parts such as renting space and hiring staff. We also all have our own jobs: after completing “Le Gouffre”, David and his wife founded “MrCuddington”(mrcuddington.com) and now create illustrations for board games from home. I now work as a 3D artist at Pascal Blais Studio(www.pascalblais.com), which specialises in animations for commercials, and Thomas works as a director and VFX artist at Hibernum Creations(www.hibernum.com), a mobile games company.

The post The power of the crowd first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

Weta Digital’s visual effects artists create digital characters and environments for the first film in Peter Jackson’s second trilogy series based on the works of author J.R.R. Tolkien.

Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy won an astonishing 17 Oscars and received 40 Oscar nominations. All three films won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects. The third film in the series even won the Oscar in all eleven categories for which it was nominated, including Best Picture and Best Director. Now, eight years later, Jackson and many of the others who created those three films came together again to give the world “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”. Sets and props were again built at Weta Workshop and the digital effects were produced at Weta Digital. As with “The Lord of the Rings”, Jackson is stretching the story of Bilbo Baggins over three films. In “An Unexpected Journey”, the wizard Gandalf the Grey pays a surprise visit to the hobbit Bilbo Baggins and convinces him to join a group of 13 dwarves, led by Thorin Oakenshield, who want to reclaim the lost dwarf kingdom of Erebor from the dragon Smaug. Their journey takes them into wild lands where they must escape trolls, goblins, orcs, deadly wargs and other adversities. Along the way, Bilbo meets Gollum, the creature who will change his life, as Bilbo finds Gollum’s precious ring. Martin Freeman is Bilbo. Ian McKellen returns as Gandalf, as do Cate Blanchett as Galadriel and Hugo Weaving as Elrond. Andy Serkis once again lends his voice to Gollum, as well as his appearance via performance capture.

Four-time Oscar winner Joe Letteri (“Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”, “Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”, “King Kong” and “Avatar”) was Senior Visual Effects Supervisor for this film. Six visual effects supervisors worked with him: Eric Saindon, R. Christopher White, Matt Aitken, Kevin Smith, Mark Gee and Jeff Copgreco, supported by a crew of 850 people at Weta Digital. Although the story is once again set in Middle-earth and Jackson uses New Zealand as a stand-in for this mythical land, there are some notable differences in production and post-production. Most noticeable to audiences is the fact that equipped cinemas will be showing The Hobbit in stereo 3D at 48 frames per second. Jackson received only lukewarm reviews for 48 fps when he showed first footage at ComicCon. Nevertheless, he held on to the belief that people will embrace the faster format in the finished film. Visual effects supervisor Eric Saindon, who came to the film from “Avatar”, was also won over. “I’m a real fan of 48 frames per second,” he explains. “The big camera moves and the action scenes are smooth and beautiful. I’ve watched my whole life over 24 fps, but now it seems jerky and weird to me.” The two technical changes created a much larger amount of data that had to be processed. “On ‘Avatar’ they made a medallion every time we reached a petabyte of data,” Saindon explains. “With this film, we probably produced four times that amount of data.”

Today, most major fantasy or adventure films have digital set extensions and digital environments among the visual effects, in addition to CG creatures and digital doubles. But few have such expansive environments as “The Hobbit” or so many creatures: three trolls, giant eagles, spiders, wolf-like wargs, hundreds of goblins, orcs, hedgehogs, horses, insects, birds, elves – and of course Gollum.

Saindon oversaw the data collection on set for the modellers and texture artists who would later create the set extensions. “We scanned every single set,” he says. “We had to collect as much data as possible to get the stereo 3D right. Some of the sets were really huge. In the past we’ve done a general survey and collected general marker information, but with this film, because of stereo 3D and 48 frames per second, we needed more data than normal to put it all together. There’s so much more visible detail. We couldn’t hide anything.”

Chris White oversaw the sequences in which Bilbo and the dwarves travel to Rivendell after Gandalf saves them from a troll attack. They then move on to the Misty Mountains and the Goblin Cave, where Gandalf rescues them once more. “We had a full team working alone on the Falls of Rivendell,” explains White. “Our effects group built our fluid simulations, and our production pipeline made them as efficient as possible to handle the difficult scenes in 48 fps in stereo.” To surround Rivendell with waterfalls, the crew built an entire library of unique simulations for the city, which were then inserted into the background by compositors as matte paintings. “We had to spend a lot of time making sure the edges looked good and the layering worked well because we were working with stereo and the extra detail of 48 fps,” says White.

Motion capture

Rivendell offers everyone a rest: the travellers after the troll attack, and the audience after the flashback to the battle between dwarves and orcs. Two animation supervisors led the 60 animators who worked with Dave Clayton on goblins, trolls, stone giants, eagles and Gollum. Reynolds, on the other hand, led the animators working on the wargs, forest creatures, Azog and the orcs. The crew used motion capture both on location and in post-production for all the digital doubles, human-like characters and even some of the animals.

“We have a very accessible motion capture stage, and we really took advantage of that,” Clayton explains. “We try to sell our visual effects to the audience as real. We record stunt doubles with motion capture and sometimes even animators in special suits. In many areas, MoCap and animation merge. We make both our own.”

On set, three actors who normally appeared as dwarves played the roles of the three four-metre-tall trolls. They provided the basis for the animation. “You want them to have a ponderous feel,” explains Clayton. “Not like blokes in suits. They were almost the first characters we tackled with animation, and it took a good year to get them right. A troll looks unrealistically light on its feet when you transfer the data of a human in a motion capture suit onto it, so we had to slow it down and stylise the poses.”

Muscle simulations

Like all CG characters in the film, the trolls also have anatomically correct bodies whose muscles and skin were applied to a polygonal model in the creature department. “Most people think of rigging as applying skin clusters to joints. We take the geometric skeleton, actually build all the muscle, fat and skin and then simulate it.” Animators work with a simple geometry that is subordinate to the bone structure. The creature group receives animation curves from the animators and then reshapes them to fit. The saved model with the skin and all the muscles and fat underneath that fill the skin then moves on in the system to the fabric and hair simulation. “We simulate everything in one big, connected simulation,” explains Clutterbuck. The lighting TDs receive a compiled file in which all the caches are connected to add the correct shading and lighting to the cached reality. In the end, these baked RIB files are sent to RenderMan. “We get most of the bakes overnight,” explains Clutterbuck. “The longer takes sometimes take one and a half to two days. The complexity is actually crazy, but at the end of the day it’s just cached geometry.

For the battle between the orcs and the dwarves, the modellers and creature developers created a hero orc and generated several orc variants based on it. All variants have a muscle system of the same quality as the Hero. This means that when the Hero changes, so do all the other variations. “We don’t switch to a simplified version because that would be too easy.” Clutterbuck laughs. “Easy is not our thing.” A “GenMan”, based on full body scans, magnetic resonance images and measurements on a sports coach, served as the template for all the bipedal male bodies. “We build our muscle models for this man, then we capture his movements and assess them digitally,” explains Clutterbuck. The artists then adapt this model to the specifications they need at the time. For the digital doubles, the modellers start with cyber scans of the actors in order to create matching polygonal skeletons in Maya. The character developers use this skeleton to place the muscles and layers of fat on it; the skeleton defines the space. “The dwarves have big, chubby hands, so we add a layer of fat on top,” explains Clutterbuck. “Each character is given their own personal characteristics, but we don’t start from scratch every time.” Working on the face is another separate step, where modellers build up an animation rig using blend shapes. “Azog (the Hero Orc) has a bit of simulation in his face, as do the trolls, but it’s just that little bit extra,” explains Clutterbuck.

In the battle, the hero orc Azog and the dwarf leader Thorin fight on a small hill. Surrounding them are thousands of dwarves and orcs performing movement sequences controlled by Massive. Peter Jackson shot the scene with actor Richard Armitage, who plays Thorin, and an actor of roughly the same size in costume. But the proportions just didn’t work. Azog had to be taller and stronger than the dwarf. So the team at Weta Digital drew the original Azog, motion captured another actor in a green suit and inserted a digital 2.10 metre tall orc with sharp teeth and scars all over his albino body.

“Then something cool happened,” explains Reynolds. “When we implanted the orc, who was over two metres tall, into the scene, the camera was focused on his body and not his face. That changed the whole dynamic. We tilted a few shots upwards, but basically we didn’t see his head, and that was great. It looked like he was so big that we just couldn’t get him in the frame.”

The Misty Mountains

In the Misty Mountains, the dwarves suddenly find themselves in the middle of a battle between stone giants hurling boulders. These shots take place during a thunderstorm with lightning, rain and fog. “We created simulations for the rain and fog in our effects department and then worked to get the movements just right,” explains White. “For the lightning, we used internal plug-ins. We wanted the rocks to shatter into pieces whenever lightning hit them and have lots more pieces raining down. Because what you definitely want to create in these scenes is a sense of menace. So we used rigid body dynamics to drop the rocks and watch them fall for kilometres into the ravine.” Fluid simulations driven by the rain caused mist to rise from the stones.

The animators had to perform two types of characters in this extract: the stone giants and the digital doubles of the dwarves, who sometimes ride on the legs of the giants. “In some ways, the stone giants were easy to animate,” says Clayton. “They move slowly and have no facial expressions. We used slow changes of direction to make them feel heavy. My biggest fear was that the digi-double dwarves would take the audience out of the story.”

The motion capture data was obtained from stuntmen whose movements resembled those of the dwarf actors. “We had to copy the movements of the dwarves as they appeared in the action shots.” The first time the audience catches a glimpse of a stone giant, it looks like part of the mountain. “When we looked at the sequence with the giants, we realised it would be nicer to light them as part of the environment,” explains White. “Not as characters.” A new proprietary hardware renderer called Gazebo helped the lighting designers to mirror the lighting design of the giant digital landscapes in The Hobbit. The GPU-based tool integrates with Maya and uses the same reality-based lighting and shading models that the studio uses in RenderMan.

Goblins

The goblins are marauders, and their habitat in the Misty Mountains is built from all sorts of strange debris and disgusting components. “We had to create digital set extensions for the absolute long shots,” explains White. “You can see the structure of the entire city underground. Caverns with lopsided stone walls that look kind of sickly. We computer-generated everything to complement the set. Hundreds of thousands of individual parts and props.” Instead of adding texture to individual parts, the crew looked at the entire environment as a whole. “We created hand-painted, triplanar textures so that we could cover a walkway with dirt and then adjust the scale of the nicks in the stone,” White explains. “With triplanar textures, we don’t have to draw every surface by hand, we can look at it from the top, side and front. This allowed us to create complex textures without having to draw assets individually by hand. Then we just slide the assets underneath.”

All the goblins in the film are digital. To create them, the creature department built 13 goblin variants and selected the most typical species as the hero. All the digital faces were created using facial prosthetics selected by Jackson and combined with the variants. The Goblin King proved to be a unique endeavour. “We added a lot of detail to him. He’s 2.70 metres tall and has a speaking part.” As with all the other CG characters, the goblins were based on the motion capture data.

Actor Barrie Humphries lends his voice to the Goblin King. As he is three times the size of the dwarves, the crew on set shot the scenes in two sections. Jackson ran a live-action camera. Another camera travelled across a smaller set to make Humphries appear the right size.

“We had Barrie Humphries in a small-capture volume next to the stage with the dwarves,” explains Saindon. “We captured his movements and sent them to the live action camera so that when Peter was shooting the dwarves, he could see Barrie as well.” The crew on set also used this idea for other scenes with actors of the same height but playing characters of completely different heights.

Actor Terry Notary provided the motion capture data for the Goblin King to the animators. “[The Goblin King] had amazingly disgusting facial features, which made him a lot of fun to work on and animate,” Clayton explains. “We took the rough edges off the captured data a bit and made him feel big and heavy. There’s a lot of keyframe animation on the Goblin King to stylise his movements and make him clearly recognisable.” The animators also controlled over 200 goblins using motion capture data. “We didn’t have enough to run a massive simulation, and the goblins were each performing specific actions in this multi-dimensional cave,” Clayton explains. “So we relied on the (Giant) Nuance Motion Editor as an important part of our workflow.”

Gollum

Bilbo meets Gollum in the Goblin Cave, where the strange creature, played again by Andy Serkis, proposes a puzzle game to him. Although it was important to make sure the character looked exactly like he did in Lord of the Rings, too many years have passed to use the same model and rig. “Although it will look and feel the same, the underlying rig changed our muscle model,” explains Clutterbuck. “In ‘Lord of the Rings’ we had to adjust a lot of deformations. This time it needed less shot-to-shot adjustments.”

One big difference with the new Gollum is the way the crew captured Andy Serkis’ movements. For Lord of the Rings, he once played Gollum for live action cameras to record his voice and interact with the other actors, and later there was a motion capture session for his posture. Since then, the Weta Digital Motion crew has worked on set and on location for films such as “Avatar”, “Planet of the Apes: Prevolution” and “Tintin”.

So on the set of “The Hobbit”, Serkis wore a suit with tracking markers and a face camera rig on a helmet. “We capture the movements at 60 frames per second,” explains Saindon. “Before we had to throw half of it away, but at 48 frames per second we have that little bit of extra information, which is the finesse.” To realise this subtlety, a new facial animation system was used, utilising the FACS-based system that allows animators to control different muscle groups via sliders. “We added a lot of extra controls specifically for Gollum,” Clayton explains. “When he pulled a particular face, we looked at exactly which muscles he was using and then combined sliders to move all the muscles at once.”

Warges and eagles

Bilbo escapes the corridors of the goblin cave and Gollum and is reunited with the dwarves, only to be chased by wargs. They look like a combination of wolf and lion and have been chasing the dwarves for the entire film. “If you compare them to a dwarf or a hobbit, they would be the size of small ponies,” explains Reynolds. In many of the shots you see 20 warges, and in some of them orcs ride the monsters. Azog rides the biggest warg of them all. “He rides a white warg,” says Saindon. “Six feet tall. And a little cleaner than the others.”

True to the idea that you should use as much motion capture as possible for the sake of realism, the crew put sheepdogs in lycra motion capture suits to get the motion data for the wargs. “It worked better than I thought it would,” explains Reynolds. “We captured them turning and shifting their weight, which is hard to do with keyframing.” The crew also captured a female dog, who was always on set anyway and available whenever the animators needed her. “We had to cut out the tail wagging,” says Reynolds, “and slow down the movements by 15 to 20 per cent. She was also hunched over because of the lyre suit, so we had to pull her bum back a bit. Once we did those three things, we got pretty usable movements for the warge.”

For the Warge’s fur, the crew used an upgrade of the barbershop system originally developed for “Tintin” to help with Struppi’s fur. Instead of specifying exact parameters for guide hairs to control the curves, the modellers prepare the curves directly. “They have tools that work similar to blow dryers, brushes, combs and scissors,” explains Saindon. Barbershop turns modellers into hairdressers. Some of the modellers are pretty good at it, as if they had been a hairdresser in a previous life. For others, it just didn’t work out.” To control the warge’s neck fur, the barbers used what Clutterback calls a “dynamic rod system”. “Barbershop allows you to influence every dynamic and control the orientation of the rods,” he says. The hunt almost ends with the death of Bilbo, Gandalf and the dwarves, but several large eagles, the only characters whose movements could not be captured with motion capture, save them just in time. “We have these wonderful long shots of the New Zealand landscape where the eagles are flying with the dwarves,” says Clayton.

Motion-captured postures helped the animators to place the dwarves in the eagle claws and position Gandalf and Bilbo each on the back of an eagle. Reference film material was used for the eagles. A script-based layering system was used to make the feathers flutter. “Feathers are always a scientific experiment,” explains Reynolds. “In the animation, we added a gentle flutter and didn’t worry about overlapping. The creature developers simulated more flutter, and stripped all our stuff of overlap.”

There’s more to come

The modellers, creature developers and animators have also created giant rabbits pulling a wizard’s sleigh, a hedgehog, horses and other creatures, all with a full muscle simulation system. But the dragon Smaug only hints at his appearance, like Gollum in “The Fellowship of the Wizard”. “He appears in the film, but only as a brief scene with a glimpse of an eye and a snout,” explains Clutterback. “And there’s lots of fire and smoke.” Smaug fans will have to wait for the second film, “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”, which is scheduled for next year. The same goes for the spiders. Reynolds has started working on shots with the spiders enslaving dwarves, but those shots have been pushed to the second film as well as the dragon. Although the crew has stopped working on this film, for many of them the work has only just begun. “Peter has already given us a third of the second film,” explains Saindon. “We’re still going to see a lot of Bilbo Baggins.”

The post A new journey begins first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

With its animated musical “More Stuff”, Blue Zoo from London got to the heart of the true spirit of Christmas last year. This year, the studio submitted the short film to the animago AWARD. Here, Blue Zoo explains how the project with the singing and dancing elves came about and how Brexit could affect the studio’s day-to-day work.

The British team specialises in the animation of CG characters for broadcast, advertising, VR and mobile games. The name Blue Zoo was chosen for the animation studio, which was founded in 2000, primarily because it is easy to remember. An animation reference was deliberately omitted from the name to make it more SEO-friendly. The entire team consists of 120 artists, the majority of whom work on TV series projects; around 15 people are involved in commercial commissions and VR and app development.

Blue Zoo likes to hire people from all over Europe, which may become more difficult in the future once Brexit is finalised. The team is waiting to see whether there will actually be restrictions on the recruitment of international staff. The fall in the pound sterling exchange rate is currently at least resulting in more orders from countries outside the UK, which the team sees as a big plus.

Blue Zoo’s biggest project to date, which has just been completed, was the children’s TV series “Digby Dragon”. The commission consisted of 52 episodes, each 11 minutes long. With “Digby Dragon”, Blue Zoo set itself the goal of raising the quality of animation content for the pre-school age target group to a new level.

More stuff!

Why do children look forward to Christmas in particular every year? Because that’s when they get the most presents! In “More Stuff”, Blue Zoo takes an ironic look at the capitalist realisation of the once fundamental Christian idea.

The project was launched when Blue Zoo commissioned a song for an animated musical as part of its in-house short film programme. Blue Zoo has worked for many years with Ben Champion(www.benchampion.co.uk), who in addition to being a qualified composer also works as a musical comedian, on the music for children’s TV shows – so he was the perfect choice for the job of writing the song for an animated musical that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Ben composed and wrote the song “More Stuff” in just a few weeks. Everyone in the studio was then invited to develop a visual design for the song and direct the animation.

Shortly before the end

Animators Simone Giampaolo and Joe Kinch only came up with the idea of the cheeky elf characters shortly before the end of the pitching phase, so they were only able to present a few quick sketches to the team in advance. Nonetheless, they won the most votes in the studio’s internal voting, after which they got straight to work on the actual production due to the tight schedule. The animatic created was also approved in less than a week, as decisions had to be made quickly in view of the tight December deadline.

The film, which is just over two minutes long, was completed in around 8 weeks, with the core team consisting of 8 artists. So that as many employees as possible could share in the experience of the project, numerous artists also created just one 3D model, animated a few shots or realised the compositing of a sequence.

Special elves

The design of the characters was crucial for the successful realisation of the film, as all other aspects of the film had to be developed on this basis.

There are already countless examples of singing elves in the world of animated films, but something special had to be created for “More Stuff”. Creating stereotypical elves with a high recognition value that are also unique was a major challenge. The team solved this problem by giving the elves huge eyes, which gave the animators many design options and gave the characters a fresh look. Three different elves were modelled in ZBrush for the entire film, which were then imported into Maya. The characters went through several iterations until the look was as close as possible to the 2D designs.

It has to be snappy

The animation style for the elves was inspired by two masters of animated comedy: Tex Avery (Bugs Bunny) and Genndy Tartakovsky (Dexter’s Laboratory, Hotel Transylvania). The team’s goal was to push the limits of CG rigs to achieve the fluid and snappy movements typical of traditional animation: To achieve this, the team utilised blurred frames, exaggerated deformations, squash & stretch and strong poses.

However, the high flexibility of the rigs was not enough for the animators, so they added lattices for greater deformation possibilities. During the animation process, the team often used the Maya plugin TweenMachine(justinsbarrett.com/tweenmachine).

Environments

The film’s 3D environments were intended to convey a large scale – but as there was no time to build elaborate 3D assets, the artists projected environment paintings onto 3D geometry. The team reused many of the assets, in particular the gift piles and the tiled floor and wall textures.

GPU rendering

The look of the animations needed to convey a real, tangible feel, which traditionally can only be achieved through higher render times. However, the project schedule did not allow for this, so Blue Zoo utilised the Maya plug-in of the Redshift render engine to take advantage of GPU rendering to achieve the highest possible quality in the shortest possible render time. Compared to conventional CPU render engines, Redshift ran 5 to 10 times faster. As the renderings could be seen much more quickly, the artists were able to experiment more with the shaders and achieve a nice look in a short period of time. Apart from Redshift, the regular studio tools were used for look development, lighting and hair.

Scripts and bugs

Before the project started, the team wrote tools to speed up the animation and rendering pipeline. This allowed the animators to work with light rigs, after which the scripts automatically copied all attributes to the heavier render rigs and optimised them at the same time. This allowed the artists to work with lightweight files that could be rendered quickly but still contained a lot of detail. At the same time, this approach prevented many potential problems associated with different file referencing.

Halfway through production, the team encountered a tricky bug that caused renderings to crash and appeared to occur randomly. An upgrade of Redshift on the render farm fixed the problem, but other productions needed the older version to run smoothly. The Blue Zoo pipeline team managed to separate the projects so that each production could use the appropriate version of Redshift. In order to realise the project in a very short time, a solid but flexible pipeline was extremely important.

More Christmas stuff

Blue Zoo is currently working on the realisation of another festive short film that picks up at the end of the story of “More Stuff” but comes with a twist. Blue Zoo plans to release the new film in December (the film was not yet online at the time of going to press, just take a look at vimeo.com/bluezoo ).

The post Noisy Night, Senseless Stuff first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In an article on Maxon’s homepage, Bomper Studios from Wales show you how Cinema 4D helped the studio create the animated music video “Country Squire” for Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Tyler Childer.

If you want to know which tools were used – alongside C4D, After Effects and ZBrush – how comic writer and director Tony Moore contributed to the project, and which shot of the music video was the most challenging (hint: it involves maps, colourful pins and a Matchbox-sized pickup truck), then you should clickhere .

You can find the finished music video right here below – together with the making-of.

Tyler Childers – Country Squire (Official Video)

Tyler Childers – Country Squire (Behind The Scenes)

The post Bomper Studio | Workshop report first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla

In this making-of for the Assassin’s Creed Valhalla advert, you will not only learn how Vikings made history, but also how motion capture, a coastal battle and the poppy breaking of the fourth wall make for a web clip worth watching. Entertainment value guaranteed!

Behind The Scenes by Goodbye Kansas

ASSASSIN’S CREED VALHALLA – CINEMATIC TV COMMERCIAL

The post Assassin’s Creed Valhalla | VFX-Breakdown first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.