Animation Artist

Animator Chris Zapara, for instance, credits a LightWave plug-in called Relativity -- developed by engineer Prem Subrahmanyan -- with being crucial to automating the gigantic sandworm featured in the Sci-Fi Channel TV movie, Dune. Zapara, then working with Area 51, Burbank (he is now at Foundation Imaging, Valencia, Calif.), had few time or budget luxuries while developing unique movement cycles for the worm.

"Much of the worm's movement happened because of Relativity," says Zapara. "It's a tool that lets you automate complicated moves. Without it, we would have had to manually begin every shot from scratch, which would have been tough on our deadline. When you have 80 to 90 shots to do, you need tools to take your animation work and replicate it quickly."

"Producers were afraid the worm would end up moving like a snake, so we took out a lot of initial side-to-side movement," Zapara continues. "That helped because he was too large to wriggle side-to-side too much. On the other hand, too little movement left him static, like a log. So we finessed it, moving motion in and out until we had unique movement. With Relativity, once we came up with the moves we all liked, it was easy to automate the process so that when the worm's head moved, his body followed."

John Teska, visual effects director at Foundation Imaging, has had similar experiences. He insists that the animation community's drive to address specific end-user problems with such plug-ins has been crucial to the recent proliferation of CG character animation.

Texturing

Sony's upcoming Final Fantasy pursued near photo-realism with digital human characters, developing special approaches for the eyes and mouth, in particular.

In both the quests for photo-real and photo-fantastic characters, the ability to reach into the real world and lift textures for insertion onto animated characters has proven priceless.

"We ran into lots of skin-texture issues on Final Fantasy," says Jones. "We developed [proprietary skin shader] SQFlesh to plug into RenderMan specifically to address the issue of how light interacts with skin from various angles. Light behaves uniquely on human skin, so animating the way it enters the skin, bounces around just under the surface, and provides a subtle warmth to the skin, along with subtle shadows, was important. Our shader automates a lot of that process."

Bob Forward, who has produced several animated television shows, is currently working with Foundation Imaging on an upcoming, syndicated, CG space show called "Dan Dare." Forward says the art of texturing has "greatly improved character work" in recent years.

"Software, in general, has gotten better, but the whole process of texturing is far more sophisticated now," Forward says. "Our animators now routinely take digital photographs of actual human skin, and in the computer, they peel that off and apply it to characters. That's why our characters will have real human skin, pores, freckles, and so on."

The choice of real-world textures for animated characters, though, may not always line up with a real-world counterpart. Zapara, for instance, also faced dilemmas of how to texture Dune's giant worm. In the end, he settled on wood.

"The original worm model was sort of brown, so we tried bark textures, and ended up with bark as our primary source," Zapara recalls. "I modified it a bit, creating more fleshy undersides, where the worm's scales overlap."

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