Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/8034
artists at Rhythm & Hues (R&H). The second installment in the fi lm franchise incorporated 20 minutes more of animation and doubled the number of main 3D characters with the addition of The Chipettes, three female chipmunk counterparts. In addition to the expanded cast of characters, action sequences were extended to feature the chipmunks playing football, dodgeball, and cheerleading with live-action high schoolers. As with any live-action/computer-generated fi lm hybrid, Helping Alvin and Friends Take the Stage D espite a repeat performance from the incomparable Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel posed a unique challenge for the digital boosting workfl ow interactivity and speed enables artists to iterate more and produce better, more seamless results. To that end, R&H deployed Nvidia Quadro professional graphics cards across 1000 workstations at facilities in Los Angeles, Mumbai and Hyderabad (India), and Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) to help preview their work more quickly and visualize CG char- acters and elements in their scenes. “There was a tremendous amount of CG work demanded in this fi lm, so being able to leverage Nvidia Quadro technology to preview our work quickly and generate many iterations of scenes was essential,” says Mark Brown, vice president of technology at R&H. To Chris Bailey, an independent animation supervisor on the fi lm, the pipeline technology is an invisible part of the digital artist’s arsenal. Bailey was involved in the fi lm from the earli- est stages, starting while the script was in development, work- ing with a crew of storyboard artists to break down the visual effects. His mandate was to cinematically meet the director’s vision, while keeping overall shot count in check. On Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, Bailey represented Alvin, Simon, Theodore, and The Chipettes on set, acting out their performances with toy stand-ins in the context of the live-action performers. He also was equally involved with the animators, as sequences were tied together to fi ne-tune CG performances. “Computer graphics technologies are as much of an indis- pensable tool today in animation as a pencil,” explains Bailey. “What’s great about drawing with a pencil is that you can just drag it across a piece of paper and make an instant state- ment. When I started making CG and animated movies over 20 years ago, the delay in posing a character and getting it to move was actually [many] minutes—you could go to lunch just to get the wireframe to compute and play back,” continues Bailey. “I remember when it became a phenomenal achieve- ment to manipulate a CG wireframe of a character and play the animation back in real time. With access to today’s computer graphics technologies, you can do all of that with a fully shaded character, and animating on screen becomes as immediate as drawing on paper.” R&H combined CGI and live action in The Squeakquel. tion pipeline, to most of the artists who work on them, they are a key component to providing R&H artists with the interactiv- ity necessary, and the ability to iterate and experiment that’s required to achieve optimal results. Part of the effi ciency of R&H’s animation process is due to a series of proprietary tools that have been battle-tested and production-proven over the company’s many fi lm projects, which include multiple visual effects Academy Awards and nominations. This tool set includes Icy for compositing, Voodoo for animating, Wren for rendering, and Eve for playback; they run alongside Autodesk’s Maya modeling software and Side Effects Software’s Houdini effects package. For this particular fi lm, R&H software engineer Nathan Cour- nia developed custom code for previewing lighting interactively on the GPU from within Voodoo, without having to create a time-intensive, full render of the scene. Thus, artists and execu- tives could quickly use high-quality preview renders to make decisions about the direction of a shot or evaluate various light- ing options almost instantly. “On The Squeakquel, Quadro’s geometry throughput allowed artists to visualize high-fi delity models and lighting scenarios. Being able to view high-resolu- tion geometry at real-time rates aids both animators and light- ers in quickly making artistic decisions,” Cournia notes. ■ 8 USER FOCUS: CHARACTER CREATION March 2010 Having overseen the CG artists on The Squeakquel, Bailey attests that animators get pulled out of the moment every time they have to wait for a shot to take effect. By removing or mini- mizing the barriers between what is in the artist’s head and the time it takes to get it on screen, the creative process is much more fl uid and the results become much more compelling. While graphics cards run in the background of the anima-