Computer Graphics World

48 November 2008 Compared to US-made CG features, what makes Igor different? Everything, and nothing, I guess. Igor has its own look and story, but like any other animated movie, it aims to give the audience a good time. Technically, I don't think it diff ers. e tools and the software are the same. However, the size of the budget and the schedule were those of an independent movie. What were your biggest challenges? Animation is and will always be the biggest challenge. How do you make CG puppets lovable? How will they bring emotion to the audience? In this regard, I am proud of our work. We did a lot of train- ing, looking at Pixar's and DreamWorks' best animation moments. We had the director repeatedly act out the 1450 scenes that are in the movie, and we have some talented people that just love acting. Did you encounter any modeling issues? e movie has 120 characters, 65 locations, and 250 props. In Malaria, everything is asymmetrical, which created quite a modeling challenge. Anima- tion was the main focus of our attention. Everything we did from the beginning was done with the fi nal animation in mind. At the end, we averaged 0.6 second of anima- tion per animator per day, which is not a lot, but it's what it takes to get to feature quality. What tools did you use? We used Maya for modeling, rigging, texturing, and animation, and Digital Fusion for compositing. We used some other software for specifi c needs, including our own tools for rigging and data management. For hardware, we have a partnership with HP, so everything at Sparx is HP, from workstations to the renderfarm, and I never heard an artist complaining about [the hardware]. First time in my life…. Did you have any particu- lar character-modeling concerns? e high complexity of the models and the unique look in 2D were the biggest challenges. It turned out that the 3D models came out nicely with unique personalities, and all in record time. How did you bring out the emotions? is all comes from having the right acting on great voice record- ings. We got lucky because Exodus (the production company) picked a great cast. Who would not want to animate on Steve Buscemi, Molly Shannon, or Eddie Izzard's voices? And then, it is all about the skills of the animators. As for the facial expressions, Sparx has a long history of developing its own tools for body and facial animation. We had to go the extra mile on Igor and bring these tools to the next level. ey're top secret but allow you to do great things in a highly customizable way. Which characters were the most diffi cult to model/animate? Probably Igor. It seems that the hero of a movie is always the most diffi cult to animate. Maybe because he is at the center of all the attention. Were there rendering issues? For rendering, we used Mental Ray for Maya. It was an obvious choice for both technical and fi nancial reasons. In the fi rst half of the production, we got support from the Maya team at Autodesk in using all the Mental Ray effi ciencies and improving the render time. is was profi t- able for both companies, as we each learned a lot of what was needed to optimize rendering. I am proud to say we provided some informative data to Autodesk as well. What about the environments? Director Tony Leondis went asym- metrical on everything, and with irregular shapes on top of that. at is what Malaria is all about. There was a big battle scene? Yes, and both the crowd and the choreography of the fi ght itself were tricky. How do you make a big fi ght and a big crowd without spending half your budget? It's all in the magic. I love the phrase: 'Magic is not perfection.' Magic we can aff ord, perfection is out of reach. So, what's next? When do we do the sequel? e team had such a good time working on this movie that this pretty much sums up our feelings right now. ■ As its main content-creation tool, Sparx used Autodesk's Maya running on HP workstations.

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