In nuce: The BBC (British Broadcast Corporation) has released a ten-minute Behind the Scenes video for the third season of the series His Dark Materials; the video focuses on the creature effects of the series season and is entitled “Populating the Worlds”.

In toto: The series is based on the three-part series of novels ( The Golden Compass, The Magic Knife, The Amber Telescope) by British author Philip Pullmann; the books deal with the dangers of dogmatic religiosity in an exciting fictional way. In the video, actors Ruth Wilson, Amir Wilson and James McAvoy talk about what it’s like to work with puppeteers on a film set. Visual effects supervisor Russell Dodgson (Framestore) also has his say; Dodgson talks about the ever-growing challenges for his team – from season to season of His Dark Materials. Executive Producer and Production Designer Joel Collins ( The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Black Mirror, London Has Fallen) asks how it was possible to transfer the complete bestiary from Philip Pullmann’s original book into the series adaptation. Creature FX supervisor Brian Fisher also provides insights into the puppetry of the animal ensemble.

Click to continue: “So much animal stuff!” was also featured in our retro article by Mirja Fürst on 27.07.2022 . An in-depth expert discussion with Cinesite supervisor Andy Morley about the first part of the Harry Potter film Fantastic Beasts.

Bringing the creatures of Series 3 to life – Behind the Scenes | His Dark Materials – BBC

The post His Dark Materials | Featurette first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: Unity has released the video “Lion: A glimpse of the future with Unity Art Tools” – featuring two lions, an adult male lion and a cub, frolicking with each other. The video is a technology demo that demonstrates the capabilities of the Unity game engine using high-resolution CG lions. The demo has a resolution of 4K, runs on a PlayStation 5 with a frame rate of 30 FPS and impresses with its realistic grooming simulation. The video celebrated its premiere at this year’s Siggraph.

Background information: Many of the tools used to create the technology demo are recent purchases from Unity – including: the vegetation software SpeedTree, the reviewing tool SyncSketch and rigging tools from Ziva Dynamics and Weta Digital. As the team describes in a blog post, the video is intended to demonstrate the collaboration between the artists and developers involved. For example, the animated lions owe their deceptively real muscle movements to Ziva, while the fur was created with the help of Weta’s grooming tool Wig. Unity used its own developments for the fur simulation and rendering. The blog post also offers an illustrated insight into the creation of the video.

Click further: All further information in the blog post New real-time demo, Lion: Unity Art Tools in action and the future of Wētā Digital for RT3D by Allan Poore (Senior Vice President at Unity). We would like to thank our colleagues at 80.Lv, CGPress and CGChannel for the background information on the video.

Lion: A glimpse of the future with Unity Art Tools

The post Unity releases tech demo with cats of prey! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: As part of our weekly recurring series “Animago Afternoon”, we present pearls, gems and other splendours from last year’s Animago film festivals at the best time of the afternoon. This time, salvaged from the Animago archives in 2019, we show you the awesome short film “400 MPH”, realised by graduates of the VFX university “Supinfocom” – with branches in France and India.

What is “400 MPH” about? Let us quote from our interview with the film team, published in DP 06:2019– not a bit self-centred: “When was the last time you identified with an animal? And not in a “I want to sleep all day like my cat” kind of way, no, when was the last time you identified with an animal in a meaningful way? Probably in one of the Planet of the Apes remakes?”, was our opening line at the time, because in “400 MPH” the ape is your favourite!

Ancient myths in a monkey’s fur: in the short film “400 MPH”, the foppish title hero is on the trail of Greek myths: the film’s plot about flying high and speed fanaticism is inspired by the story of Icarus.

The makers behind it: The creative minds behind this rousing short film are: Julia Chaix (CG Generalist at Ubisoft), Alice Lefort (Set & Animation Production Manager at Illumination Mac Guff), Lorraine Desserre (Rigging TD at Eisko), Natacha Pianeti (VFX Artist at Untold Studios) and Quentin Tireloque (3D Animator at Stratosphere Games). As you can see: The former Supinfocom students have found a professional home.

Click further: The short film, which (it feels like) breaks the sound barrier, is linked below in full length. We say: film off – and don’t go to the centre of the sun! Find out more about the educational programme at rubika-edu.com .

400MPH | Court-Métrage | RUBIKA Animation 2019

The post 400 MPH | Animago Afternoon first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: Because we’re also in the mood for jokes on 1 April, but would like to refrain from phone pranks, ringing pranks or other childish things, we’re sending you this amusing video in which the cast of the animated feature film fun “The Bad Guys” from DreamWorks – including podcast pioneer Marc Maron and enfant terrible Chris Rockwell – attempt to recreate the hairy protagonist Mr Wolf.

What is “The Bad Guys” about? The plot of the animated film revolves around the five anthropomorphic friends Mr Wolf (the pickpocket), Mr Snake (the burglary specialist), Mr Shark (the disguise artist), Mr Piranha (the muscleman with breathing problems) and Ms Taranha (the team’s IT specialist). The film’s plot begins at the point when the notorious criminal team is caught and they are all threatened with imprisonment – until Mr Wolf senses a plan that could save the five-man gang from jail..

Click to continue: If you want to get a further impression of whether “The Bad Guys” is worth a visit to the cinema, we recommend that you also click on the featurette, which we have also linked below.

Draw Mr Wolf with the Cast Director | The Bad Guys

The Bad Guys – A Look Inside Featurette

The post “The Bad Guys”: celebrities as amateur artists? first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: Ubisoft recently unveiled the so-called “ZooBuilder” via social networks. This is a tool that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to recreate the basic skeletal structure of animals. All of this works on the basis of moving images that the user feeds into the tool. “ZooBuilder” is designed to help animators create character rigs. However, artists still have to fine-tune the resulting rig afterwards so that the movement sequences of animated animal characters look believable.

How does this work? The three-minute video below, called “ZooBuilder – A Machine Learning Prototype”, takes a closer look at this fascinating new tool. In the video, Abassin Sourou Fangbemi, data scientist at Ubisoft La Forge, explains the advantages of the tool as follows: “Imagine you wanted to record the movements of a lion or a tiger – you would have to take these dangerous animals to a motion capture studio. That would be quite a challenge.” according to Abassin, “ZooBilder” will now dispense with MoCap and rely on machine learning and AI instead. This should make it easier to digitise the movement sequences of animals.

Who invented it? The “ZooBuilder” was developed by Ubisoft La Forge. This is a branch of Ubisoft based in Canada, which is dedicated to the development of new technologies – always with the help of the latest results from academic research organisations.

Click further: You can find out which technological developments Ubisoft LaForge continues to drive on the corresponding website.

The post Ubisoft tool makes creature rigging easier first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

Penguin Bloom

In this VFX breakdown, Altvfx demonstrates how to make an Australian pheasant crow look believable, whether in flight, wrestling with fellow birds – or resting on Naomi Watt’s forearm during a time-out.

The Australian-American Netflix film Penguin Bloom, based on the book of the same name by Cameron Bloom and Bradley Trevor Greive, tells the story of a woman who becomes a wheelchair user after an accident; she then struggles with herself and her new circumstances, but soon regains her courage to face life after taking in and caring for an injured flute bird.

We find: The creature character Flute Crow Star deserves the VFX Bird of the Year award!

Penguin Bloom (2021) – VFX Breakdown

The post Penguin Bloom | VFX-Breakdown first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In the Disney film, the hero played by Willem Dafoe and a lead dog become the saviours in the legendary serum Run to Nome. In the VFX breakdown from DNEG Studios, numerous contributors have their say: Animation Supervisor Aaron Gilman, Animation Leads Arna Diego and Leonardo Bonisolli, Creature Supervisor Adam Vanner, Build Lead Lucas Cuenca and Creature Lead Mischa Kolbe talk about the three-minute film.

The facial performances of the four-legged friends posed a particular challenge for the team. Creating a believable movement sequence for the eleven sled dogs while an ice floe collapses under their paws was another challenge for the DNEG artists. Find out more in the video below:

The post Togo – The Untold True Story | VFX-Breakdown first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

This article by Anna Huber originally appeared in DP 02 : 2014.

In this still, a lively metal panther catches the viewer’s eye. With its emerald green eyes and filigree decorations, the animal looks like a piece of jewellery. The animago submission for the still category 2O13 was created by 3D artist Anna Huber.

The image was originally created for a 3D contest on PSD-Tutorials on the subject of “Steampunk”. My idea was to transform a real living creature into a machine. The mechanical creature was to have the characteristic features of the animal and the typical steampunk elements. I decided on a panther – an elegant creature, light-footed and fluid in its movements. And filigree in a certain way. A steampunk panther should not be made of heavy metal parts, which would make it appear heavy and clumsy. Instead, thin plates were important, which defined the body in ornate ornaments and also gave the viewer a view into or through the body. The ornaments and decorations were not chosen at random, but reflect the panther’s area of distribution and thus the cultural patterns of the population in Africa. I used Cinema 4D as the software and V-Ray as the renderer. Photoshop was used for post-production.

Light / Rendering / Camera

The first step was to set the global illumination in the V-Ray render settings. I created the basic lighting using an HDRI light. The nice thing about HDRIs is that they create a general and – depending on the setting – realistic basic brightness with a certain colour mood. This gives you an initial overview of the lighting mood. In the next step, I loaded the HDRI motif into the V-Ray Area Light and changed the Area-Type to “Dome”. “Enable Shadows” and “Invisible” were activated. To ensure that the lighting conditions of the background texture and the scene match later on, the area light was aligned so that the “sun” of the HDRI comes from the same direction as the “light” on the background texture later on.Finally, I added another light source directly behind the panther to intensify the overexposed sun of the background image by casting a shadow on the panther. The camera was fitted with a 50 mm lens, the aperture was set to 2.8 and 1/100 second was selected as the exposure time. A beauty pass and the corresponding multipass layers were rendered.

Materials

All materials were created in V-Ray. The metal material was generated first. To do this, a photo of a metal plate, which had previously been colour-adjusted in Photoshop, was loaded into Diffuse Layer 1. To adjust the final details of the colour directly in Cinema 4D, I also loaded a filter shader into diffuse layer 1. In this, the saturation was set to 51 per cent and the gamma value to 1.4. In the Bump Channel, the same photo of the metal plate was loaded only in black and white and Bump Amount was set to 1 cm. Specular Layer 2 was responsible for the highlights. In addition to the general settings, I entered -0.5 for Anisotropy. Specular Layer 3 was used for the specular reflection. I also activated Fresnel and set its IOR to 2.43. The Reflection Glossiness was set to 0.8 and the Glossiness Subdivs were increased to 12 to avoid too much grain. I realised the concrete and stone material with the help of suitable textures and it has a similar structure to the metal materials.

Modelling

First of all, I roughly outlined the panther so that I could later adapt the shapes of the individual plates to the skeleton better. The skeleton should be visible through the plates and decorations and was modelled true to life. I replaced the bones with bent iron rods and the joints with cogwheels, cadre joints and metal joints. The plates were then modelled and adapted piece by piece. For the plates with the spirals, I mainly used Bezier and helix splines, which were subordinated to sweep nurbs together with a rectangle spline. First, the plates with the decorations had to be modelled flat and then brought into the correct shape using deformers. The pure metal plates were modelled poly by poly. The “Edge selection to spline” tool was used to create a spline for the border. This was then subordinated to a sweep nurbs together with a rectangle spline. Finally, I had to connect the panels both to the skeleton and to each other.

Rigging

The rigging was built in parallel with the modelling to ensure that the individual parts interlocked perfectly. Due to the mobility of the outer shell and the skeleton, I had to make sure that the axes of the joints were congruent with the axes of the modelled joints or that they overlapped. This ensured that the movement of the plates was synchronised with the joints and that the axes of the joints always rotated around their centre point. IK chains were used for the legs. There were additional controllers with an Xpresso setup for the claws. The face was also realised using an Xpresso setup. For this, I created user data in a null object and connected it in an Xpresso tag with the angle of the jaw, the ears and the visor using a range converter. Finally, all modelled parts were subordinated to the corresponding joints. In order to keep the whole thing a little clearer and to be able to quickly show and hide individual areas of the panther, layers were assigned to all objects.

Problems

The main problem with the panther was that everything had to fit together well, but the panels could not collide with each other during posing and animation. The solution was to build the rig in parallel with the modelling and to test it again and again right from the start. The scene was very polygon-heavy and slowed down my work in the editor. For this reason, I worked a lot with the layer manager and set the detail level of the editor to “low”, especially when texturing and posing. This made it possible to easily show and hide or render individual parts of the panther.

References

Visual and textual references about appearance, movement and behaviour are essential for a realistic representation of the object. In addition to various panther reference images for a correct skeleton and muscle structure, I was inspired by steampunk elements, armour, metal decorations and ornaments.

Post-production

I used Photoshop for the post-production. To achieve a stronger metallic effect, I enhanced the highlight and the reflection using the corresponding multipass layers. The background texture was colour-matched to the panther, creating a warm, unnatural mood.

The post Steampunk Panther first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.