Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/336920
FEATHERING 28 ■ CGW M ay / Ju n e 2 014 feather lifts off the body), and which feather types to use. The groomers did not have to generate every single feather, and instead relied on the grooming tool to instance and blend them together into the desired effect. Another tool allowed the artists to draw in areas of finer detail. "For instance, in the areas surrounding a bird's eye, we need a higher density of feathers, and this tool allowed us to achieve that without increasing the resolution of the underlying geometry," says Zeevalk. "A separate tool allowed us to control basic feather direction with a few pen strokes, instead of hav- ing to hand-comb each feather." A final piece of the puzzle was the deployer, a multi-faceted tool for distributing and applying grooms and feathers within each shot. On a macro flock level, the deployer decided which birds received which grooms. "With our volume of birds, we wanted a way to procedur- ally assign grooms to individual birds, so our system looked at what types of birds existed in a given shot and programmati- cally dispersed grooms, taking note of which birds were in proximity so we didn't end up with two similar birds butting up against one another," explains Zeevalk. ■ THE USE OF DEEP COMPOSITING enabled Look Effects to work in 3D space and was crucial to completing the work. Visual Effects Graphics Video Animation Software Film 3D Digital Animation Effects Software Film Graphics Game Technology Design Computer Artists Visual Tools Systems Computer Graphics Production Models Features Art Applications Games Web Director Media Animated Scene Performance Workflow Lighting Industry CGI System Technology Data Modeling VFX Characters Users Rendering Media 2D Interactive Computer Graphics World: your destination for all things CG Subscribe Today! • www.cgw.com Follow us on: @CGWmagazine http://www.facebook.com/pages/ Computer-Graphics-World