Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/7010
Perhaps most importantly Patton says, "As I Iearned about 3D, ZBrush became more friendly to the artist, so we grew together." In fact, the tool advanced to the point where a few months before Avatar was scheduled to hit theaters Cameron asked Patton to design a "really nasty bug" for Pandora. "A week later we had six or seven digital models in full-color renderings and maybe 30 ar t pieces to show him," Patton recalls. "Jim said, 'Have things really changed that much since the beginning of the film?' We were able to do things more efficiently each time we were asked for something: What had taken a month before now took a day and a half. The tools were acting like a time machine." One of the challenges Patton had with Sigourney Weaver's avatar, Grace, was making her recognizable to audiences. "Everybody knows what Sigourney looks like, so how do I make her recognizable in her avatar character while bringing out her heroic qualities? What parts of her features should I keep?" He says that while photo sessions and scans of the actress were all useful, "it came down to the ability to sit with the ZBrush digital sculpt and move things around to find the most pleasant features, the best way to represent the character. I could have done Photoshop all day and not been able to represent what the final character would look like." Digital sculpting also allowed him to go directly to Cameron for his input. "With- out laborious practical sculpting I was able to get a lot of ideas out really quickly. What if we used her eyebrows from Ghostbusters? What if I altered her color? I could take this forehead, that nose, those eyes and put them all together," he explains. While Patton says he's done "due diligence" and tried other 3D sculpting soft- ware, no other tool makes him "feel like I did when I was sculpting with clay — without getting the clay under my fingernails." The character design he's doing for the new film, John Carter of Mars, is "all ZBrush-based," he reports. TO T H E WO LV E S At Berkeley, CA's Tippett Studio (www.tippett.com), lead CG modeler Seung Jang Jack Kim recently modeled a hero wolf for Twilight: New Moon, which drove four additional wolf characters. "They had the same geometr y and face shape, but we split out the nose, mouth, eyes and the top and edges of the lips so we could control them sepa- rately and give different values and different looks to each wolf," explains Kim. The film's wolf was realistically wolfish in appearance, but was unrealistically large: the size of a horse. Tippett's VFX supervisors traveled to Wolf Mountain, a preser ve in the Mojave Deser t, before production began to take photos and movies for Kim and his colleagues to use as reference material. That was essential to capture what makes wolves wolves and not domestic canines. "Their snarl shape is totally different from dogs," says Kim, citing one example. "They have clear wrinkles flowing in different directions, so we made our base geometry match the snarl wrinkle shapes of real wolves." He used Autodesk's Maya to create 300 different facial traits for the wolves which, when blended together, worked seamlessly to make a believable beast. Mouth movements would trigger subtle forehead movements, for example, and "make the wolves look alive," he notes. "The most powerful tool for this kind of fa- cial expression is Maya." Since the modeling department is very upstream in animation, Kim and his fel- low modelers built the wolf geometry, which simultaneously fed teams of painters and riggers.To deal with the wolves' fur, Kim made the hero animal a bit thinner in his carcass, as a shaved wolf might be, then groomed the fur splines onto that geometry using Tippett's own Fur Tool plug-in for Maya. "The look of real fur on a cer tain shape is sometimes impossible to make in the CG world, so there was a lot of back and forth with the painters who were rendering the fur." The painters developed a root map and tip map for the fur texture and another map for the skin of the wolf to produce the animal's color." The muscle shapes of real wolves can be seen through their fur. But Kim discov- ered that if he realistically sculpted those muscles not much would be visible to the audience. So he "sculpted exaggerated muscle shapes so you could see them," working with the riggers to make sure they appeared only in certain poses. Maya was firmly in place in the middle of Tippett's pipeline, says Kim, where it sat "as the base of the model and worked with other departments using Maya." This hero wolf from Twilight: New Moon was modeled in Maya by Tippett's Seung Jang Jack Kim. They created 300 different facial traits for the beast. www.postmagazine.com February 2010 • Post 23