Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/110653
CG Animation city of Zambezia." But, with the characters being able to fly at substantial speeds and over vast distances, the producers found themselves having to constantly extend the sets and add more detail. "We found that our sets had to be much bigger than we initially anticipated and needed to work from many more angles than a ground-based movie would require," Buckland points out. The art direction for the bird city of Zambezia was informed by the concept of "No Chairs;" this was Thornley's mantra throughout the production. What he meant was that anything that appeared in the city needed to look as if it had been conceived and built by birds. Birds have no use for chairs or ladders, and are quite at home in an environment that is both vertical and horizontal, so the animators had to build all the sets with this in mind. The city of Zambezia was especially organic and complex. Each object was built up from many smaller elements, such as sticks, bark, mud, leaves, and woven grass or thatch. Each of these elements required extensive geometry and texturing detail. "We have a talented texturing team that worked wonders in creating the impression of complexity with painted textures," says Buckland. Softimage was again employed for all the terrain modeling, and ICE was used extensively to procedurally dress the environments with plants and other vegetation. Also, the team used Pixologic's ZBrush for sculpting and texturing work, while Adobe's Photo- To generate the birds' feathers, the artists used mbFeathersTools, a plug-in to Softimage that utilizes the ICE platform, allowing them to more easily groom and style the plumage. shop was employed as well, for texturing and matte paintings. Although the artists incorporated extensive textures, the environmental sets were still polygon-heavy. Scene files for the sets could run up to 500mb in size, which made the loading and saving of files especially slow. "Our workstations and render nodes had only 12gb of RAM," notes Buckland. "Fortunately, Soft image is quite good at managing large datasets despite the limited RAM available, which certainly helped. But, all the sets had to be optimized quite extensively on a per-camera basis to work within this limitation." By the Numbers •30tb of data was rendered and spread over two 18tb file servers. • Imagery was rendered out on 60 1U render nodes (single-socket quad-core Xeon boxes with 12gb RAM running at 2.97ghz) working full time, along with 80 workstations (i7-950 and i7-960 boxes with 12gb RAM running at 3ghz and 3.2ghz, respectively) after hours—so the amount of nodes would increase to about 140 nodes after hours. • One IT person oversaw the production. •Zambezia is believed to be the first bird movie where rigs were created to let the birds fly, gesture, and fold their wings in one shot, as opposed to the preferred movie "cheat" of switching shots to avoid using the same rig to do a fold through to a proper flying mode, to a human-like gesturing. • Each bird character had an average of 18,000 feathers, with the marabous being the exception of only 9,000, as they only had body feathers. High-resolution versions of the environments were created for the close-up framing, and many lower-res versions were substituted for the wider shots. The wide shots of the baobab tree required hundreds of thousands of polygons just to describe the leaves. To compose the entire scene, the group generated approximately 500 different models, such as the nests, walkways, flocks of birds, branches, and other organic elements, including the tree itself, which meant that some scenes would contain millions of polygon faces and thousands of different texture maps. In the close-up scenes within the branches and walkways of the baobab tree, the artists did their best to reduce the scene file sizes and limit what could be seen on screen. Buckland says, "Wherever we could, we hid parts of the sets with large clumps of leaves from the tree." Because of the organic nature of the Zambezia tree-city set, the environmental artists had to model extremely uneven walkways and floors. This affected the animators, who had to ensure that the characters achieved accurate foot contact as they walked around these unique sets. In the end, though, Buckland is pleased with the results for this environment. "Ultimately, I think that it all came together to create a visually stimulating environment with an African twist that most people will not have seen before," he says. A Long Fall Possibly the largest environmental element the production team had to face was the splendor and beauty of Victoria Falls, which ended up being more than 1,000 meters (roughly 1,100 yards) from the top to the bottom of the gorge January/February 2013 CGW0113-Zambezi2pfin.indd 25 n n n n 25 1/31/13 5:15 PM