Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/8034
Broadcast n n n n their performances, and yet get across character with body language and facial expressions.” Te Framestore crew Using Maya, the Framestore team modeled and animated 23 CG beavers, matching their look to the animatronic star of the commercial. focused on swimming, building dams, preen- ing, and other beaver stuff. Tat way, when we got the board, we’d have an animation library built up and could hit the ground running.” Once the storyboard came in, Rooney split up the shots. “We’d already done the more nat- uralistic beaver animation,” he says. “Now we had to go back and tell a story through blocked performances and, in particular, a couple of close-up shots of digi-beavers. We had to be faithful to the animatronic fiddler. We had to make sure ours looked like beavers in terms of crafted its CG creatures using Autodesk’s Maya for the modeling chores, rigging, and animation, with some pre-comping that was done in Apple’s Shake. Maya and Mental Images’ Mental Ray were used for the rendering. In the end, Framestore created 23 digital beavers, with two different hairstyles (dry and wet), using its own groom- ing system and a newly developed fur shader. “Tat was more important for the close-up shots, where the beavers were quite large in frame,” says Bichsel. “We also had to make sure they had distinctive color differences. We were able to control the root and tip color of the fur and how coarse and shiny it was, so we manipulated all these channels to get them to look different. With our system, you can paint while looking in the 3D viewport and move the direction of hair, and it updates very quickly.” As a result, the team spent less time on troubleshooting, contends Bichsel, and more time on grooming, painting, and gen- eral creativity. Senior Flame artist Raul Ortego, meanwhile, spent most of his time doing rig removal. “It was quite simple but labor-intensive work,” he says. When the rig was behind the animatronic, the work was much easier. But sometimes the rig was in front, requiring a track (within Autodesk’s MatchMover) and the addition of fur. Some shots had camera moves that had to be replicated in Maya. For rotoscoping, the tool of choice was Silhouette, named after the manufacturer. “Tis was a really fast turnaround for creat- ing digital creatures,” concludes Jenn Dewey, VFX producer. “Te final animation was [done] a few days before we were supposed to finish lighting the whole spot, and that was two days before it shipped to Flame.” Never- theless, the spot worked well. n Debra Kaufman is a freelance writer for numerous entertainment industry publications. She also writes about content for mobile devices at www.MobilizedTV.com. She can be reached at dkla99@verizon.net. March 2010 29