Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
Blogcast
MillimeterRockFish: Blur Lands A Big One
Feb 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
RockFish represents the latest calling card from Blur Studio of Venice, Calif. Creating the over-the-top, comic action-adventure of this nine-minute computer animated piece took about four months. Using inhouse short films as vehicles to test new techniques is a venerable tradition in the evolving field of CG, and RockFish lives up to that tradition.
 |
RockFish is a fishing story, Blur co-founder Tim Miller, says. Miller also wrote and directed the short film. “It's really ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ set in the desert. The premise is that huge fish swim in the lava beneath the surface of a faraway planet. An ‘exterminator’ character uses an elaborate rig to drill a hole to catch the mother of all Rockfish.”
Miller says that this is a “buddy pix,” because the protagonist has a sidekick critter that looks like a cross between a monkey and a dog. The final con-frontation in the film begins with what Miller calls “the hardest shot.”
“The Rockfish starts to come up out of the sand and uses its claws to try to pull these characters down,” Miller says. “This shot has both character animation and probably 12 layers of effects.”
Blur began with multiple animatics created in Discreet's 3ds Max. “The 3D animatics kept evolving almost up to the day we finished,” Miller says. “We didn't have the luxury of finishing one part before moving on to another. We started modeling things like trucks, which we knew wouldn't change regardless of where the camera was. For the environment, we built ‘kits’ of elements — like 20 different kinds of rocks — that could be put together at the last minute.”
A fairly tight animatic did exist before Blur commenced a hybrid process of mo-cap/keyframe character animation. Using Vicon and Kaydara's MotionBuilder software, they motion-captured every-thing, but then deleted lots of the data they'd captured. By keeping only every third or fifth keyframe, they wound up with a kind of ‘motion sketch.’ The animators then did keyframe animation on top of that, again using 3ds Max. For the character animators, says Miller, “it wasn't quite as heinous as just tweaking curves in mo-cap. They actually got to throw in a little creativity. At the same time, this approach retained some of the nuances that you get from motion capture.”
Along with the main animation, they used the 3ds Max plug-in called Stitch to handle the sim animation of things like the main character's clothing and his sidekick's floppy ears. Blur was able work efficiently on different parts of the project simultaneously by using software in 3ds Max called Point Cache, which allowed them to save and update data efficiently. When an animator passed on a piece of animation, for example, this software would automatically update the scene assembly file. “There was no delay,” says Blur's Kevin Margo, who oversaw Rockfish's scene assembly. “The animator would simply send an email saying, ‘The point cache is updated; you can render it.’ That cut down time.”
For rendering, Blur used both Brazil Rendering System software and the scanline renderer in 3ds Max. “The environmental elements, the characters, and the vehicle were rendered in Brazil,” says Margo. “One thing we used for lighting the characters was the GI Skylight option — it's kind of a fake radiosity. It saved us lots of time in the end. We used the scanline renderer for the atmospheric passes, the effects passes, and the sky backgrounds.”
“The scanline renderer in Max is still quite efficient,” says Miller, “and there are lots of situations where you don't need Brazil. In fact, you're wasting CPU cycles if you use it. There are instances where it's faster to render the back-grounds with the scanline renderer and render the characters in Brazil. That's what a multi-pass approach allows you to do.”
They also used a tool called Render Elements, which is a Max script posted on the Blur website. It enabled them to save all the properties necessary to get multiple shadow passes in a single shot without having to reset lights each time. It basically saved ‘the state of Max’ for every pass — a useful timesaver in a shot with 12 passes.
Not all the elements in RockFish were 3D-CG. For the swirling sand effects in this desert fight, Blur used a combination of 3D volumetric smoke and stock footage on 2D cards. “If the camera isn't moving a whole lot,” says Margo, “you don't notice that something is a flat card. In some cases we didn't even put those cards in Max — we'd just comp them in [Eyeon Software's] Digital Fusion.”
Facing the challenge of compositing the film's 120 shots in about three weeks, Blur developed a “template” Digital Fusion file that they could basically plug each shot into. At the end of this process came color correction and any stylistic touches that they wanted to apply to the images. They used Adobe Photoshop and edited in Premiere.
Of all the software used in RockFish, Miller singles out a program called FrameCycler (from Iridas) as being a huge asset. It works by loading film resolution frames into RAM, and allows you to play them back in realtime. “You can even load two sequences and they'll play side-by-side so you can check continuity issues. I spent more time in FrameCycler reviewing stuff than in any other piece of software.”
The need to be efficient while producing a “labor of love” project like RockFish has helped Blur advance its data management tools and further streamline its character pipeline. The studio can now keep working on character animation much later into the process than ever before. “What we've done with RockFish is being implemented in all our new projects,” Margo says. “So in the end, it pays off.”
Tim Miller - Writer/Director
Jeremy Cook - Visual Effects Supervisor/Art Director
Sherry Wallace - Producer
Jeff Weisend - Animation Supervisor
Heikki Anttila, Irfan Celik, Jeremy Cook, Jerome Denjean, Kevin Margo
- Modelers
Kevin Margo, Jerome Denjean, Heikki Anttila - Scene
Assembly
David Nibbelin - Layout
John Bunt, Jeff Weisend - Mo-Cap Supervisors
Daniel Perez Ferreira, Seung Jae Lee, Kirby Miller - Visual
Effects
Jon Jordan, Paul Hormis - Technical Directors
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.