Computer Graphics World

September 2009 38 n n n n Computer Animation and dirty environmental elements, and to provide certain visual effects elements that were incorporated directly into the final composites—such as bullet hits in one of the shots in the War Flashback sequence. "His passion in describing the 'feeling' of the sequences enabled us to quickly move toward artistic and technical solutions that achieved the look and mood that he intended for each of the extremely varied locations and situations that the characters faced," says Bell. Aside from Acker, Christophe Vasher and Kevin Adams also played a major role in the look and feel of 9. Vasher's initial art work formed the basis of the color palettes used in the movie, as he played with com binations of warm and cool colors as well as staged the lighting. "If the main light sources were warm, shadowed areas would contain cool pools of ambient light," says Bell. "If the main light sources were cool, the reverse would be true." As Bell points out, light sources became one of the characters of the movie. How ever, this posed an extreme artistic challenge for the lighting supervisor and team in that the pools of light needed to help form the stage for the characters, while at the same time, not feel forced. "In many cases, the lights were treated as 3D vignettes in order to accomplish the goals of the original con cept artwork," he adds. Adams, who served as art director, fol lowed through on that initial vision by carefully scripting the color through the sequences to match the original concept work and by working with Bell in execut ing those scripts within the lighting depart ment. "A large portion of the grandiose nature of the movie was due to his efforts i n guiding the mattepainting team in the generation of 2D and 3D mattes and cam eraprojected paintings to enhance the envi ronments and raise the overall artistic level of the show," Bell says. Key Tools e main software package for the feature, as it was for the short, was Autodesk's Maya. All the character anima tion was keyframed by hand, and dynam ics were a combination of traditional key framing and Maya dynamics with nCloth solver simulations, in some cases layered, to enable the animators or character finalers to put the finishing flourish on the anima tion generated through the simulations. For the movie's textures, the team used a combination of Adobe Photoshop and Autodesk Mudbox, while the lighters and compositors made heavy use of Eyeon's F usion, using custombuilt plugins for re lighting scenes and objects inside Fusion, and shader reconstruction within Fusion for basic lighting. For rendering, the group used Mental Images' Mental Ray. At Starz Animation, extended work was done on the relighting pipeline for use on 9 by increasing the quality of the solution and adding additional features required by the movie that were beyond that of previ ous productions. Setting the Scenes According to Bell, the design, modeling, and surfacing of the characters and envi ronments were fairly standard in terms of CG creation. e art department, under the supervision of Adams, crafted the de signs and then worked on the models and texturing, with Acker approving. Because Acker was located off site, he used Rising Sun Research's CineSync and Photoshop to mark up the renders, which were sent back and forth digitally. Storyboards and rough layouts were used as guides for the environmental LODs during surfacing. All the environ ments were textured with a "coverage pass" first—a rough texture pass that en abled an asset to be passed to lighting for the establishment of the environmental light rigs. is surfacing pass, Bell says, The characters in 9 are burlap "stitchpunk" characters with numbers sewn onto their backs. Modelers created them and the villains, as well as the background objects, in Autodesk's Maya. Animators keyframed the unique 9 characters in Maya and added dynamics within Maya nCloth.

• Cover