Features | |
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Crash and Burn |
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Spot Focus : Good Stuff |
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Percy jackson and the Olympians |
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Making Of Long Journey |
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The Making Of Salty |
News Headlines | |
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Baby Data |
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Brickyard VFX for Toyota Nascar |
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IT'S ART Archive |
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This Shall Pass Too |
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CG Gallery Awards - Febuary 2010 |
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The Making Of unleashed |
Other Features | |
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Death to all Iron Warriors |
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Making Of Dominoes |
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Shilo for Census |
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Making Of Cable |
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Toy Story Concept Art |
IA: Can you speak about your pipeline from character modeling to final rendering?
DH: Blackginger is in an exciting period of development as far as pipeline goes. We recently overhauled many parts of the process as well as how the artists work. We adopted a more international workflow and reorganizing how data is sent from one department to the next. Once we received the final approved script, we began previs. For two weeks before the shoot, we modeled rough shapes to depict each character and set up the shots with the director. Taking photographic references on location before the shoot, we were able to reconstruct the layout of the forest. The area where the action would be taking place was modeled in our database and used for blocking the shots before any camera was turned.
Using those rough shapes as scale guides, our modeling team continued to build the characters and add the details. A process with a lot of back and forth between Blackginger and Shy the Sun to get each character just right.
Once the characters were 75% complete, they were able to be sent to rigging, where most of the rig could be setup before the character model was finished. This non-linear approach with XSI was helpful in keeping the delivery. If each model were finished before rigging started, we would not have completed “Precious Biscuits” on time.
Another element that evolved with the commercial was the fur and hair. The characters had placement geometry to suggest hair, fur or feathers and only later did we decide on a method to accomplish this. Our deadline was too tight to problem solve before we actually started, which would cause many headaches if not handled correctly.
The layout person got the camera data from the tracked footage and, using the previs scenes, was able to set up each shot for the animators. The camera track was also sent to compositing at the same time to be used in After Effects for tracking in more trees and plants, giving the scenes more depth. Once the animation was complete, we exported the final approved camera and bgeo’s with Point Cache MDD to our VFX team for fur. The fur had already been groomed in Houdini so updating the MDD for each character only needed small tweaks to fix any glitches in the fur. The fur was rendered with hold-out geometry and shadows and sent to compositing.
While fur was being rendered downstairs, upstairs we were using XSI’s render passes to give our compositors every single pass and ID mattes they requested. Quickly adding more passes to the queue is what makes XSI a pleasure to use. The final frame count of more than 9000 frames for all the different passes was handled effortlessly by Royal Render.
IA: Can you give us more information about the software used and why you use XSI and/or Houdini for some parts?
DH: Softimage|XSI is our software of choice for modeling and animation. Lighting and rendering for “Precious Biscuits” was done in XSI using Mental Ray, but we are in the process of slowly converting our studio to render through Mantra. The short fur on all the characters was groomed, lit and rendered in Houdini. XSI has proven to be an amazing toolset for small studios and we found the ease of use and the integration without software beneficial.
