Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/17873
n n n n CGI In the end, most of the hero characters were given a relatively moderate polygon count—50,000 to 100,000 quad polygons— to facilitate animation and rendering time. For texturing the characters, Chen hand- unwrapped the UVs the old-fashioned way using Maya’s texture UV editor, occasionally utilizing projected UV mapping and relax UVs to even out overlapping UVs. Using Adobe’s Photoshop CS3, he then hand-painted the surfaces and “blend-mode-layered them” over organic tex- tures from photographic sources. For example, the mottled look of the frog skin was achieved by using zucchini skin as the base layer. At times, procedural 3D textures were ap- plied to quickly add noise and shading variation to the characters. While Biggy’s skin was rather generic in its design, Bounce’s skin was closely based on the natural coloration and patterns of the popular red-eyed tree frogs of the Amazon. With its distinctive yellow stripes over bluish- purple patches, along with vast areas of green and white, Bounce’s skin texture needed to be familiar yet customized to make him appeal- ing as an animated CG character. To this end, the filmmaker generated individual texture maps for the color, specular, and bump chan- nels, with the occasional map for transparency tedious tasks for the bipedal and quadrupedal characters, including those with tails. How- ever, for the less-anthropomorphic characters, like the snake, wasps, and scorpions, he made the rigs from scratch and custom-skinned them to each model. For the facial rigging, he stud- ied medical textbooks to better understand which human facial muscles are responsible for which human emotions, and rigged the char- acters accordingly using mostly Maya’s influence objects as deformers. For squash and stretch, he used lattice deformers to apply non-uniform deformation to all the main characters. Chen simulated the characters’ breath- ing by using non-uniform scaling of selected bones created by Te Setup Machine. He paid particular attention to engineering fine shape controls, especially for the character eyelids, eyebrows, and lips, in order to achieve the expressions and emotions required by the story. Meanwhile, he used sculpt deformers for special effects, such as when Bounce was swallowing his food and the bulge can be seen descending down into his belly. “One big lesson I learned from making this film is that caterpillar characters are very hard to rig cor- rectly, let alone animate properly,” Chen points out. “So, avoid caterpillars!” on getting the fundamentals—like overlapping actions, anticipation, arcs, strong poses, exag- geration, timing, and appeal—rock-solid,” he says. “Most animators are familiar with these basic principles of animation in their early years of education, but it takes a lifetime to learn how to apply them artfully. It is all too common for CG animators today to rush into their 3D soft- ware and start moving characters around aim- lessly because it is easy to do.” By prolonging the storyboarding and thumb-nailing process in pencil and delay- ing work on the computer, Chen could try out rough ideas quickly and cheaply on paper first. Te results were apparent. “I noticed that whenever I did due diligence and planned character expressions, poses, and gags thor- oughly on paper first, the end result invariably turned out stronger and better when translated to CG,” Chen says. One of the benefits of applying strong prin- ciples of 2D animation to CG is that the ani- mation tends to loosen up and feel “more free,” Chen maintains. To support that statement, he points to the concept known as “breaking the joints,” which is used traditionally in 2D to give character animation more snap and im- pact. “Such exaggeration translated beautifully to CG when the rigs could be pushed beyond their breaking point,” Chen says. “Given the creative license to channel Chuck Jones and Tex Avery, I made sure to capitalize on any opportunity for exaggeration whenever a gag called for it. Te more the rigs were pushed, the funnier the characters got.” Chen used Maya for all the character anima- The filmmaker spent a good deal of time in preproduction, using Maya and Edius to make sure the story and timing were on the mark, such as in these scenes as Bounce sizes up a delectable scorpion. and reflectivity. Te maps were limited to no more than 2k x 2k pixels in order to minimize memory issues during rendering. Once Chen finished with modeling, he had to rig the broad range of characters for opti- mum articulation and performance during animation. To facilitate the rigging process, he used Anzovin Studio’s Te Setup Machine, which automated many of the redundant and 30 August/September 2010 Moving to the Beat Although Chen has been animating success- fully for many years, he wanted to take the process to a higher level with “Amazonia.” So, before embarking on the animation for the short, the filmmaker re-educated himself in this area, investing a good deal of time and effort re- learning the fundamentals. “I re-read Richard Williams’ Animator’s Survival Kit and focused tion, following the 80/20 rule: “Although it’s not too difficult to take a given animation 80 percent of the way, the last 20 percent can take twice as long to achieve and drive one to insan- ity,” Chen says. Terefore, the filmmaker de- cided early on that he needed to budget enough time to strive for the last 20 percent “because that’s where characters came alive and became most believable and appealing.” Alas, that trans- lated into many long hours of finessing curves in Maya’s graph editor and lots of keyframe nudging in the dope sheet. Tis was particularly taxing due to the sheer number of shots Chen had to animate on his own (there are 99 shots in “Amazonia”). “My unwavering commitment to meeting this goal was largely responsible for adding at least one year to the production schedule,” Chen points out. Chen also spent a great deal of time animat- ing the characters’ eyes. Because the eyes are the window to a character’s soul, he made sure to pay a lot of attention to eye-dart animation,