Computer Graphics World

November 2008 34 n n n n CG I VFX producer Jean-Jacques Benhamou from Mac Guff describes the fairy-tale style of Dragon Hunters as "a Miyazaki mood mixed with German romantics influences." In contrast, the worlds of Dragon Hunt- ers contain realistic surfaces (grass, water, stones, fire) but with unique physics in which everything is moving all the time. "e worlds had to feel real in order for the adventure to be credible," says Qwak. "So we approached it similar to a live-action film. at meant realistic rendering, matte paintings, and a tremendous amount of work on compositing. e characters, while cartoon-shaped, have realistic textures." According to executive producer Michael Coldewey from Trixter, the shape of the characters and the entire production design is one of immense contrasts. "If we have to show something big, it is big in this movie. If there is a happy moment, we show little, fluffy, white bunnies flying through the sky," he adds. Coldewey also believes the film gives audiences time to enjoy the art- work: "We have some fast-edited sequences and action, but we also provide emotional pauses to relax and enjoy the art." Character Building In all, the film took more than two and a half years to complete—one year of devel- opment (storyboards, designs, references, and a 2D animatic) and another year and a half of CGI production. e majority of the film's CG work was done by Mac Guff, which created the characters, rigs, textures, and some animation. e facil- ity also did all the background renderings and composites of the final images. Trixter, meanwhile, was responsible for the charac- ter animation and the musical score. Lux- Animation modeled the props, sets, and backgrounds. In addition to a sometimes language barrier among the three studios, the fa- cilities had to ensure that their production pipelines were connected and compatible for asset sharing. Also, the studios had to work as a single production unit. Using sketches, paintings, and clay mod- els as references, the crew at Mac Guff used Autodesk's Maya, along with a good amount of in-house software and special scripts, to bring the Dragon Hunters characters to 3D life. Character layouts soon followed to val- idate the 2D-to-3D transfer in terms of the look, proportions, and so forth. One of the biggest challenges, says mod- eling and lighting supervisor Nicolas Brach, was creating some very stylized characters that would be integrated in very realistic environments—a look they dubbed "illus- trated realism." is required the modelers to focus on adding fine details to the mod- els while retaining their "uncluttered style." Often, this meant adding more modeling detail to the character's props and suits rather than to the cartoonish heads and faces. For example, Knight Lens Flair and his horse have very realistic, detailed ar- mor on more stylized and cartoonish body structures and proportions. While all the characters had their unique qualities, the most difficult to model, says Brach, was Hector the blue dog-dragon— not because of his shape, but his topology. "From the beginning, we knew we had to consider all the motion possibilities he should have," he says. "We had to be able to squash and stretch all parts of his body, including his eyes and teeth, without crash- ing the skinning and blendshape process." Another was the World Eater because of its size (450 feet tall); also, it was to appear in both wide shots and close-ups. For the hair and fur—from Zoe's braids and Lian-Chu's ponytail, to the fur trim on the clothes—the artists at Mac Guff used the studio's proprietary tool called Symbor. With the tool, they generated guide splines on each vertex of the fur, then "brushed" them into the modeling layout with special tools, akin to using combs. Afterward, they created a large number of hairs to fill the surface using those guides. For every char- acter, the team had at least three hair sys- tems for different densities and thicknesses, and then chose the most appropriate sys- tem based on the location of the charac- ter on the screen and its proximity to the camera. "We didn't want to unnecessarily overload the memory," Brach adds. e hair and fur—as well as the clothes—moved with the help of dynam- ics, as well as with Syflex's cloth-simulation tool and the plug-in from Mac Guff. For the most part, the group hand-paint- ed the textures in Adobe's Photoshop and used Pixologic's ZBrush as well to create displacement maps and deep UVs to deal with the film's complex texture projections. To ensure that the stylized characters fit well Most unusual are the film's environments, which are in constant motion and float in midair, as do elements and debris, created with a particle-based system and turbulence field.

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