Computer Graphics World

September 2009 34 n n n n Trends & Technologies the world to life. It also lets us have great- looking backgrounds and cut corners by not having the artist draw out the backdrop," explains Cipher. "It frees our animators to work on movement and make the charac- ters as lifelike as possible. ere is a degree of tedium when taking a printed comic, pull- ing out the elements, drawing new ones in, p repping, and animating it all. Improving the technology and adding 3D elements cuts out some of that tedium and stream- lines the workflow. It's pushing the limits of what we're able to do. In the future, all of our original motion comics will have 3D animation in them because it's allowing us to tell the story like never before." Catastrophic Comics employs Autodesk's Maya to bring the comics to life. More to Like "I believe the future is motion comics," says Chris Folino, owner of Sideshow Productions. "Traditional books will never die, but as motion comics become more mainstream, it will eventually come to a point where both a printed version and an animated motion version of a comic will be released simultaneously. One day, you will be able to walk into a shop, buy a book, and then download it on your iPhone, iPod, or Kindle, and see the pages come to life with g reat actors, music, and story." ere are those in the comic-book world who see the Internet as the future of comic- style stories. Scott Christian Sava, founder of Blue Dream Studios, has been working on his online comic e Dreamland Chron- icles since 2001. What separates his work from others is that while the comic lacks motion, it is made completely in 3D using 3ds Max. e Dreamland Chronicles is about Sava's fascination with dreams and fantasy. It's taking all the books he grew up on and trying to extrapolate the best of them all into something fun. "It's about a boy who goes back to the land of dreams he used to visit as a child, where he finds that all his childhood friends have grown up, as well," explains Sava. "It's about faith. It's about re- membering your innocence. It's a romance story. And, it's just fun. It's something for my kids, and something for me." Sava began his career as a painter and then migrated to video games, working on projects such as Starcraft 64 and Aliens vs. Predator. He then entered Hollywood with feature films, including Casper, and TV shows such as Spider-Man and NASCAR Racers. He established Blue Dream Studios as a Hollywood animation studio, and to- day, the facility works full time creating 3D comics, several of which are making the leap to the big screen, including Pet Robots at Walt Disney Pictures and Hyperactive at MTV Films. Sava creates his comics as if they're feature films. He writes using Final Draft's screen- writing software. en he storyboards with pencil and paper. All the 3D work is done in 3ds Max and rendered with Brazil, from Splutterfish (which was recently purchased by Caustic Graphics). en the images are taken into Photoshop, where the artist uses a plug-in called Lenscare, from Frischluft, t o handle depth of field. "When I first started using CGI in com- ics with Spider-Man in 2002, it felt cold," recalls Sava. "I came from illustration. But my career took me into video games and, eventually, into animation for film and television, so I had the skills I needed to try something different. It's incredibly time-consuming. I've been working on e Dreamland Chronicles since 2001...writing, storyboarding, posing, lighting, render- ing, and compiling the panels and putting the pages together. Now, I've got a good rhythm down, and I'm still updating five pages a week on the site (www.thedream- landchronicles.com), where we have more than 12 million readers worldwide." During the past seven years, there have been more than 30 people involved in the production of e Dreamland Chronicles, which is done virtually from around the world. e process starts with the character designs, which are then passed on to the character modelers. Afterward, they are rigged and the morph targets are made. One of the main reasons Sava toils on e Dreamland Chronicles is because he believes that comics from DC and Marvel are too mature for kids today. His work is all family friendly and aimed at the main- stream kid audience, which, regardless of the content, is where all these comics are aimed. And 3D technology is giving them a boost, along with an original avenue, to s peak to these consumers. n John Gaudiosi has been covering the world of video games and the convergence of Hollywood and computer graphics for the past 16 years for outlets like The Washington Post, Wired Magazine, Reuters, AOL Games, and Gamerlive.tv. Scott Christian Sava has been pushing 3D in the medium for quite a while through his Blue Dream Studios, most recently with The Dreamland Chronicles.

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