Computer Graphics World

e concept for Delgo, from germination to realization, un- folded over a 12-year period. "When I joined Fathom in 1997, Marc had already been talking about doing a movie," says Warren Grubb, animation director/VFX supervisor, about the ambitious desire of Marc Adler, Fathom president/executive producer. "To- gether, we toyed with the idea for a few years, drawing pictures and thinking of story concepts. en, in 2000, we made the deci- sion to do it." By 2003, a star-studded cast had been selected, and production soon followed. "We were flying by the seat of our pants. We had never done anything like this before, and we had to deal with limitations in terms of bandwidth and available technology because we're an independent facility," says Adler (see "Independent Minded," pg. 4). "However, as we later discovered, 'independent' does not mean 'inexpensive.' " Nevertheless, Fathom was embarking on this journey with far less money in its pockets than the typical Hollywood studio. Ready, Set, Delgo With a small budget for a project of this size, Fathom had to be fiscally conservative and resourceful in terms of the software and hardware chosen for the film's production. In the end, the studio expanded its existing Autodesk Maya pipeline, which had been used for short-form television projects (such as station tags) and interactive Web content. "Warren and some of the team devised a number of technologies and methods that allowed us to be very efficient," says Adler. "at is one of the main reasons we were able to do a movie of this quality and scope in the time that we did and with the resources we had." In fact, Maya was the main tool for just about every aspect of the content creation, and the team took advantage of MEL to write hundreds of custom scripts for tasks ranging from the simplistic to the complex. Nevertheless, the group's early attempts at modeling the film's characters entirely on the computer (from illustrations) failed to produce a cohesive look in a timely manner. Alternatively, an artist sculpted the main character models in clay. en, using a Cyberware scanner, the crew digitized the maquettes and turned the point data into usable meshes. "ere is software for extrapo- lating NURBS, but it is expensive. So we just wrote scripts in Maya to help with the process," says Grubb. In the end, though, the group used polygons rather than NURBS to facilitate ren- dering and deformation. A morphing system, created in-house, enabled the team to generate crowds, while MEL scripts provided the necessary AI to direct them. e film's characters—which are human-like—were animated by hand. "We knew we had to keep the characters as flexible as possible so they could be rigged quickly and changed easily," explains Grubb. "We chose smooth-skinning almost exclusively, avoiding other deformers, such as blendshapes, clusters, and wire deformers, so we could use scripts to easily copy binding information." Alternatively, the artists used influence objects and extra joints to achieve the necessary deformation. "We were able to drive joints, influence curves, and influence meshes with set-driven keys and expressions to get everything from muscle bulging to subtle facial wrinkling," adds Grubb. "Keeping all the meshes within smooth-skin clusters made it easy to, for instance, change surface topology extensively on a character and transfer all the binding information with a button click." By using the master rig and adjusting the base bones to a particular character, the animators could rig a character in a single day versus weeks. Many of the characters can fly, so the wings and motion blur were big considerations in the production. e wings had to be large enough to look like they would be able to lift the character, but they had to appear light enough to keep the character from looking weighed down by the massive appendages. To avoid that issue, the artists added veins with large, translucent cells. "We ex- perimented with a lot of settings to get the best blur, and ended up rendering on ones or twos, depending on the scene, to get a good insect-like speed of flapping," explains Grubb. December 2008 41 Artists modeled and animated two separate races of Delgo's human- like characters in Autodesk's Maya, giving each a distinctive look. December 2008 41 CG I ■ ■ ■ ■ Images ©2008 Fathom Studios.

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