Computer Graphics World

April 2009 44 n n n n Education Iuri Lioi joined them. Lioi, who graduates this year and has a position waiting for him at DreamWorks, modeled, rigged, and ani- mated the adult dog. He spent 10 weeks on the production—two weeks modeling and the rest animating. e project presented both technical and conceptual challenges. According to Lioi, the rig had to be flexible enough to support the changing proportion of the dogs' front and back legs throughout the piece, "to make it look like a urber dog illustration being animated," he adds. e complex rig, built in Maya, supports FK and IK, and contains three layers of bones for each of the two main dog characters. "We were trying to reproduce urber's style, which uses 2D lines and is organic, only we were doing it in three dimensions," says Lioi. "at was challenging." Leashed Creativity As Lioi explains, artistically, the students had to ask themselves, "How would urber have animated his own drawings and illustra- tions?" en the group had to animate the art based on urber's style, not their own. is was easier said than done. e group started with a source that was nontechni- cal: 2D and, in some cases, 1D drawings that are cartoony. "His is not a subject you would look at and immediately think you should do it in 3D," points out Albright. "For us, the challenge was using the tools we had available that allow us to do many things, yet remain true to the charm and the particu- lar look of urber's work. It's very specific. People can identify his drawing style." Palazzi agrees with the students' assessment. "In the beginning, the art looked deceptively simple because urber's drawings are de- ceptively simple," she says. "But once the students start- ed studying the anatomy he was drawing for the dogs, they found that the anato- my changed from drawing to drawing." urber particularly fo- cused on hounds, Scotties, and poodles. However, when inspecting the dogs closer, the students dis- covered that in one instance, urber had used a part from one dog and another part from a different dog, and combined them into a breed that didn't exist. As a result, the students had to interpret the anatomy of the unique dog and come up with dif- ferent types of movement based on that anatomy. At one point in his life, urber become blind in one eye, and many of the charac- ters he drew were especially flat, with very little perspective and an orientation that fa- vored one side, notes Berezina-Blackburn. As a result, the ACCAD students' imagery had to reflect those same qualities. Also, the artists had to proceed without ortho- graphic views or maquettes as references. "ey didn't know what was on the other side of the dogs because [urber] didn't draw that, but the students had to include [the missing information] in their 3D models," Palazzi says. "Many of the students started out thinking, 'Oh, this shouldn't be too hard,' but once they re- ally studied the drawings, they found the work to be more of a challenge than they had realized." Another big challenge was simply pro- ducing the 20 minutes of animation, which is still laborious, no matter the sub- ject. e models were rendered using the Maya software renderer, which supported Maya Paint Effects, used to create the black cartoon outlines for the subject matter. e students also created custom paintbrushes within Maya Toon shaders. "Technically, Paint Effects and Toon are rich tools, but there were many variables that were diffi- cult to control," says Berezina-Blackburn. "You can get a lot of cool effects easily, but achieving something precise is difficult." e group used After Effects for post- processing, to give the imagery a hand- drawn feel and a lower frame rate than the traditional 30 frames per second. "urber's drawings are very conceptual rather than physically accurate or photo- realistic," says Berezina-Blackburn. "He used lines to express a mood or a state." e team had looked at early hand-drawn ani- mation material to see if they should imi- tate or replicate a particular style, or come up with their own way to stylize the move- ments of the dogs. In the end, they decided to "reinterpret" urber's drawings. The Thurber dog animations were projected above the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra during the live performance.

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