Computer Graphics World

September 2009 39 Computer Animation n n n n was sufficient for most of the assets and camera positions. "e completed storyboards and rough layouts gave us insight as to where the sur- facing details would or would not hold up, enabling us to expend effort where it really made a difference on screen," explains Bell. More to the Story e biggest hurdle in terms of 9's content creation was the overall complexity of the assets, notes Bell. "Geometrically, the envi- ronments and characters were very heavy and placed quite a load on the technical hardware and software infrastructure of Starz Animation," he adds. All the character assets had an "anima- tion look," a medium-resolution version that sacrificed detail in order to be more memory efficient, both in terms of texture usage and polygon count, Bell explains. An extreme example of this was the Fab- rication Machine: e original high-res model had geometric data for all the nuts and bolts, but those details were eliminated in the lower-resolution asset, enabling the animators to more effectively work with the machine-character. Another hurdle, says Bell, was the overall look of 9—it needed to be extremely dark and moody, and had to portray a post- apocalyptic environment. is posed two technical and artistic challenges. First, the environments needed a large amount of set dressing in the form of rocks, pebbles, and other debris. So a number of assets were created for the final layout, to al- low for quick placement of these elements to dress the scenes to camera. ey took the form of various prop assets, known various- ly as "rock god," "pebble god," "junk god," and so forth. ese combined a number of smaller assets into larger chunks that could be brought in and manipulated to dress the scenes appropriately and quickly, maximiz- ing the on-screen density of these types of objects, and minimizing the amount of work required by final layout to maintain the complex look of the movie. Second, the overall dark nature of the movie required particular attention to de- tail in shadow areas. "It was imperative to ensure there was image information in the shadows," says Bell. To this end, the art and lighting departments performed value studies prior to lighting, and then con- trast, hue, saturation, depth of field, and atmosphere were played off one another in varying amounts so that depth was main- tained in the imagery, he explains. It also imbued the film with a general feeling of dread and decay. While not new but a great influence on the look of the film was the expanded use of 3D matte and projective camera-paint- ing techniques, which pushed the imagery of 9 in a slightly painterly direction. It also enhanced the scale of what was possible in a short production cycle. Also to streamline production, the art- ists developed enhanced lighting propaga- tion techniques to enable a parent-child relationship between key shots and shots derived from those key shots. is included management of the Mental Ray caches and automatic generation of compositing scripts that were derived from the key shots. us, the lead lighters were able to propagate their lighting to their team in an automated way for greater consistency and speed. Starz's animation clip and pose system de- veloped for Everyone's Hero (see "Painting a Picture," October 2006) and subsequently used for other productions, helped speed up the creation and reuse of animation for cycles and poses, as well as to maintain con- tinuity between shots. In another timesaving move, the group created a 2D camera to mimic certain 3D camera moves. As Bell explains, lay- out would perform a move within Maya, and information was extracted from the 3D scene to create a camera move within Fusion. e team subsequently rendered a single frame of the background, thus en- abling paint-over work to be performed on background elements when the move was small enough (for slight camera bumps or small pans/tilts). is also saved the artists precious time when rendering background elements in the scenes. How will audiences embrace this unique story and style of CGI? We'll soon see. While audiences have been slow to em- brace the medium for anything other than children's movies, perhaps now its time has come. With Burton behind the project, au- diences just might open their minds to this "new" way of filmmaking. Karen Moltenbrey is chief editor of Computer Graphics World. The feature film extends the concepts and creations of Shane Acker from his short-film "9."

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