Animation Artist

Animators at Pacific Data Images (PDI), Palo Alto, found themselves struggling late last year to keyframe moves for the villain from the upcoming PDI/Dreamworks CG feature film, Shrek. Eventually, it became clear to filmmakers why their initial attempts to bring the evil Lord Farquaad to life were failing.

Dune's gigantic sand worm posed animation and texturing challenges for artists working on the TV movie.

"Farquaad is a tiny man with a near photo-real looking face and a distorted body," explains Raman Hui, Shrek's supervising animator. "We initially had him moving in a theatrical way, very exaggerated. Eventually, as we began matching the voice track with the animation, we realized we weren't completely on the right track. The character is voiced by John Lithgow, with a booming, powerful voice that didn't seem right coming out of this tiny character. We eventually decided he needed more subtle breathing movements, chest expansions. Therefore, we built special chest heaves into the animation controls, and whenever we heard a sound that suggested breathing on the audio track, we inserted one of those chest heaves."

Hui and Andrew Adamson, the film's codirector along with Victoria Jenson, say PDI also added more head and neck movements to sell Farquaad. "The idea was that, for Farquaad to project that kind of voice, he needed to put his whole body into it and labor with his breathing," explains Adamson. "That change made a huge difference."

How to achieve "believability" with CG characters has been debated for years. With such characters now dotting the media landscape, filmmakers and animators have made significant strides. But like Lord Farquaad himself, believability is still a subtle thing that is difficult to define, let alone execute.

Animators, directors, and producers currently working on major CG, character-oriented projects recently highlighted for VisFX some of the major developments that have helped raise CG characters out of their infancy and into adolescence.

Tools Do Matter

Various stages in construction of the character Shrek: (top to bottom) skeletal stage, basic muscle layer, muscle and skeletal layers combined, wire-frame, and low-res version. DreamWorks' animators perform most keyframe animation procedures using the low-res model of the final character.

In the CG world, a character's initial design impacts what new tools filmmakers will essentially have to invent or improve as they move into production. If details such as hair, fur, cloth, eyes, and skin, among others, are not defined early, it may be too late to create tools to handle them later.

"We initiate a significant R&D project at the same time we initiate design work in the earliest stages of preproduction," explains Ed Catmull, president of Pixar Studios, Emeryville, Calif., and recent technical Oscar recipient for his work on RenderMan's texture-mapping functions. Pixar, now currently deep into production on Monsters Inc. (due for a November release), is already involved in R&D for two more upcoming features.

"Once you are in production, certain character components have to be locked down," says Catmull. "In Monsters Inc., for instance, much of our innovative work was done with hair and fur because ugly, hairy monsters star in the film. One character, though, wears a shirt, which meant we had to improve our cloth tools to work smoothly on the body of a monster. We had to turn that specific, creative need into a production tool early on. For our next film after this one, Finding Nemo, there is an entirely different R&D project under way."

Similarly, a few years ago, Disney Animation itself initiated a major R&D project to improve the studio's ability to manipulate muscles under, and in concert with, flesh and skin. That fruits of that project were featured prominently during last year's animated feature, Dinosaur.

DreamWorks/PDI and Disney/Pixar are no longer alone in such efforts. Years of R&D likewise preceded current production work in Hawaii on Columbia/TriStar's upcoming CG sci-fi feature, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, based on a popular video game. That film has a specific goal of getting as close to photo-real as possible, according to Andy Jones, the project's animation director at production company Square USA, Honolulu.

"We know you can't achieve perfect photo-realism, but we wanted to pursue a new style of CG close to photo-real, but flavored like [2D Japanese] Anime," says Jones. "The company has been in R&D to achieve this goal since 1997. In that time, we have built specific facial-animation tools to make our characters more lifelike. We've developed a new skin shader, muscle movement under skin, moistness in the eyes, peach-fuzz hair on top of the skin, and so on." (For more on Final Fantasy see next month's Millimeter.)

Such breakthroughs are hardly limited to feature films. Many studios are applying development work initiated for larger projects to their small-screen work. ILM, for instance, recently refined its metallic texturing tool used on features to animate a Pontiac commercial in which a giant, metallic cat chases a Pontiac.

"The client wanted the cat's movements to be fluid, and so we based them on reference footage of cheetahs, lions, and tigers," says Tim Stevenson, ILM's CG supervisor. "His exterior, though, had to have a metallic sheen. We decided to use scanned metals as a base to texture the cat, but on top of that, we used a brushed metallic texture that we had developed. It gave the cat a stainless steel look, with tiny scratches along the surface. We developed a special shader to create that look, emphasizing specular highlights, but not too shiny."

Those animating characters outside the umbrellas of monolithic studios, however, usually don't have the cash or infrastructure to develop the proprietary tools readily available to ILM, Disney, DreamWorks, and a few others. Many, of course, rely heavily on innovations contained in the main, off-the-shelf, animation packages. Indeed, tools like Maya, Softimage, 3D Studio MAX, and LightWave have essentially revolutionized character animation in recent years, particularly since the arrival of inverse kinematics to connect movement to a character's skeletal structure.

But many character animators also credit "smaller tools" -- third-party plug-ins -- for making CG characters more widespread.

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