Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1469382
28 cgw a p r i l • m ay • j u n e 2 0 2 2 character progresses from birth to death. In the VR version, which can be played on the Oculus Quest or Ri platform, the "player" can directly experience the changes in climate and seasons that take place in the film. "You observe what's in the tree or on the ground, what the boy is drawing in the sketchbook, and floating into the heavens," says Oh. The main character in the film is universal, as Oh wanted every- one to feel as if they could be that person. "I wanted you to feel like you are growing up with the boy," Oh ex- plains. "Depending on how old you are or what type of life stage you are at, you'll experience it in a very different way. But at the end of the day, life is filled with a variety of things. It's not always beautiful, hon- estly; it's filled with ups and downs. You have happy, joyful, amazing moments, but at the same time, you also go through sorrow or anger, rage or the lowest point, and rock bottom. Sometimes you gotta hit your rock bottom and go through all those ups and downs. If you lived your life to the fullest, the tree of your life is beautiful." Exactly how many objects are in the tree? Hundreds, possibly even a thousand. Introducing Quill This project marks a first for Oh in terms of working in VR and using Quill to create a story. "Namoo is about the imperfections of a human life, so the film needed to feel human and imperfect. Quill enabled us to achieve that," he says. "The artist literally draws, paints, designs, and ani- mates very intuitively with their hands in the virtual space. It's as simple as grabbing your own paints and moving them around to bring life to it. Every single brushstroke is directly from the artist's touch, so it really provides the handmade, watercolor, traditional warmth that a film like Namoo should convey." Anika Nagpal, production manager at Baobab Studios, contends that Namoo is the most ambitious project to have ever been at- tempted in Quill from an art and animation-quality perspective. As a result, the team was making many discoveries along the way and had to work collaboratively to find creative solutions to problems that arose during production. "For example, we built an entirely-new pipeline from scratch for Namoo to bring together the best in multiple, different soware to achieve that final look we were going for," says Nagpal. "Our engi- neers and artists were the type of people who think both creatively and technically, and they worked very closely to make that happen." Art director Eusong Lee generated all the concept art using Ado- be's Photoshop, which was then imported into Quill, while Oh creat- ed the storyboards using TVPaint Animation Pro. Using the concept art as reference, Franke, Ladd, and Brower used Quill to turn those concepts into 3D by drawing and placing colored 3D strokes to form each character, prop, and environment. "It's a lot like creating miniatures and dioramas; there's no com- plex modeling, UV wrapping, or texturing. It's just colored strokes, and it's much less technical than other 3D pipelines," says Ladd. Once the Quill artists completed their first passes of the char- acters, Oh would do draw-overs so the artists could fine-tune the positioning and shapes. Ladd describes the animation process in Quill as a mix between stop-motion and traditional 2D hand-drawn animation. Quill has an animation timeline, but unlike other 3D soware, such as Autodesk's Maya, there is no interpolation, so all the animation is done frame-by-frame. Each object and character is its own layer, and each new frame is a copy of the previous one, so an artist can change its geometry to create animation. "There's no rig, so you can manipulate the geometry however you want, and even add or remove strokes from one frame to the next," explains Ladd. Moreover, Quill has a red/blue onion skin that helps you see your previous and upcoming frames, similar to 2D animation. In fact, the process for animating is similar to 2D: The animator blocks out key poses, sets breakdowns, and then does in-betweens once everything is approved, Ladd adds. Throughout the process, the Quill animators worked with Oh, who provided rough 2D animations as a timing guide. However, there are no lighting tools in Quill, leaving it to the artists to hand-paint the lighting and cast shadows within the tool frame- by-frame. "The soware is entirely unlit vertex color with no built-in light rendering," Ladd notes. "This lack of soware lighting gives the artist total creative freedom to light or paint however they want. In our case, the Quill artists worked with Eusong Lee, who provided us with 2D-painted images of the exact lighting for each scene and character." Baobab Studios produced the film in both theatrical 2D and interactive VR. "Namoo is about the imperfections of a human life, so the film needed to feel human and imperfect. Quill enabled us to achieve that."