Computer Graphics World

November 2008 36 n n n n CG I tem negated any need to use facial poses. No motion capture was used, though some characters were influenced by real-life ac- tors—Gwizdo (Joe Pesci) and Zoe (Kate Hudson from Almost Famous, and Miran- da Cosgrove from School of Rock). Another challenge was that, due to the production schedule, the teams began animating before the final dialog was re- corded, limiting them to only animat- ing portions of sequences that were not dialog-driven for the first few months. "Fortunately, there were plenty of action sequences in Dragon Hunters, but not all the animators are necessarily differentiated toward action-based animation; some are natural actors who may struggle a bit with the concrete and technical nature of physi- cality," explains Balda. In addition, casting was still going on in the early months of the film, but that limitation proved beneficial when the crew moved to the acting sequences: "By that time, the animators had become familiar with every joint and anatomical movement of the characters," Balda points out. Lip synch proved especially challenging, as the dialog was created in English to at- tract a widespread international audience, while the animators were predominantly French. To make this process go more smoothly, Balda accompanied the direc- tors to the voice-recording sessions in Los Angeles, to offer a native perspective. "For an animation supervisor, this is an unusual practice, but now I am convinced that it should be part of the process," Balda says. "Within eight days we recorded all the character voices, focusing on one charac- ter at a time, from start to finish, from the perspective of that specific character. Later, this proved invaluable when I was work- ing one-on-one with the animators to help them understand where their character was in his or her respective arc." Balda also gave the animators a video reference of him lip-synching the final re- corded dialog, so the French animators had a reference of the mouth poses that were not obvious to a non-English speaker— this was particularly helpful for Gwizdo and Zoe, who talk very fast and use a lot of slang. Environmental Issues One unique aspect of the film is the float- ing islands. "We had to take into account the fact that all the animations were made before the modeling of the high-defini- tion sets even began, and that the anima- tors worked on low-definition scenes made solely for them," explains Franck Clarenc, modeling supervisor working on the film's sets and environments. "As a consequence, all the assets in our pipeline were created according to that low-definition layout, which was divided into arbitrary parts that were much too heavy when turned into high definition." In the case of the floating village, the artists created it as a single scene, which, according to Clarenc, turned into a huge li- ability when they reached the critical poly- gon mass that made working in real time within Maya "a distant memory." So, the group cut the huge data into smaller bits, and with help from the development team, automated the gathering of those sub- scenes into a single, massive one, thereby enabling the artists to work on the various individual parts in a more convenient way. "Basically, we visualized in our asset manager the sub-scenes and the global scene in the form of a nodal tree, where we could connect, disconnect, and replace at will any part we wanted," explains Clarenc. "is was a major achievement in flexibil- ity, work division, and efficiency for us." roughout the film, there is a lot of debris flying around, some of which are just rocks, but others are part of destroyed buildings. To achieve the "floating" effect, the group devised a particle-based system to generate a turbulence field; that, along with a direction-based rotation script, moved the "flying" rocks, vegetation, and more. ere are also a number of buildings in various states of disarray during different "chapters" of the story. Because of the tight production schedule, the group had to find a way to optimize the creation of those heavy models; in the end, they designed most of the structures using modules that could be reused and, with some modifica- tions, would allow the group to craft as many different buildings as needed. "We originally thought about using the same nodal techniques as we used for the flying village in our asset manager, but that turned out to be impractical: It was Artists surrounded each set with a sphere mapped with a high-resolution matte-painted sky. Most of the reflections are actual blurred reflections; sometimes they are environmental maps.

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