RenderDigimania Case Study - 'Plant Food'

Our aims were to:

• Create a high-end, cartoon-style animation to show the capabilities of RenderDigimania.

• Demonstrate RenderDigimania’s ability to integrate assets from different artists and software into one package.

• Explore how we could further involve RenderDigimania in an animation pipeline.

• Use RenderDigimania’s powerful Static Lighting feature to improve render times.

• Use our findings to improve the software.

Digimania’s own team of seven 3D artists and animators worked on the project.

Michael Friel Barry Sheridan Claire Quinn Emily Pollacchi

Navis Binu Kevin McDade Martyn Gutteridge

Once we had the assets and idea we produced a quick concept image in Photoshop.

We searched TurboSquid to find some assets that would fit our brief. With a little digging we found a boy character and an alien environment. After some discussion on what the story could be, we decided that a second character was needed, so back at TurboSquid we found a monster plant which appeared to fit nicely with the style set by the other models.

After the assets were collected and assessed we came up with the idea that the boy would be an explorer travelling the universe surveying planets. The boy would teleport into the alien environment and begin to survey the vegetation. Meanwhile the monster plant would attempt to catch the boy for its next meal. The monster plant would become increasingly frustrated as the boy teleported out of his reach just in the nick of time.

The project emerged from pre-production in need of attention. Specifically, the composition and colour palette of the early ideas was poor. We also had problems with the fidelity and quality of some of the models in close-up.

So, following a review, we redesigned the set and characters with fewer colours, simpler composition, better textures and less prominent silhouettes.

3 meshes: Hair, head, body 18,425 triangles unsmoothed 74,050 triangles smoothed 7 materials, 9 texture maps 30 morph targets 1 UV set per mesh

5 meshes: Tongue, leaves, roots, arms, head 19,700 triangles unsmoothed 79,064 triangles smoothed 3 materials, 6 texture maps 30 morph targets 1 UV set per mesh

Each character model was prepared for RenderDigimania:

• Characters were ported from 3ds Max to Maya

• T-posed for rigging

• Extra topology added for better deformation

• Models were separated into individual meshes

• Morphs were created

• Materials and texture setup

• Materials applied for subdivision (65k per material poly limit)

• UV clean up

TurboSquid artist credits: Boy 2 by OZZY OSBOURNE, Monster Plant by GrafxBox

< Model in quads < Geometry only where it matters < Combined meshes < Lo-res, smoothed later

Unlike previous projects we developed a pipeline that made use of RenderDigimania’s Static Lighting system. It also saw RenderDigimania – and not Maya - as the location of “master” environment. First, we took the assets from TurboSquid and cleaned them in Maya. Once render-ready we exported them as FBX files using our custom scripts. They were then imported into RenderDigimania’s project library and set up with materials.

The environment was created and dressed in RenderDigimania and exported to Maya for the animators to use. The animators imported the characters into the sets and began animating. The finished animations were exported as FBX files and imported back into the RenderDigimania scenes, to be rendered as frames for compositing.

With both characters cleaned up and ready to go they were passed to the rigger for rigging. Once the rig has been built and the weights applied, the character would then get published to the animators and become an actor. FBX files only support simple bone- and morph-based rigs so we had to ensure that the fully-featured animation rig could drive a simpler FBX-compliant rig.

The monster plant went through a back-and-forth process until we were happy with the deformation with the neck and vines. RenderDigimania allowed us make changes to the rig and weights at any point throughout the entire process without disrupting any other aspects of the pipeline.

The published actors were passed to the animators along with the dressed scenes from RenderDigimania. With everything in place, the animation started with a blocking process. Animation progress was assessed using Maya playblasts.

Once we were happy with the blocking, the animation continued with a first pass, second pass and a final pass. With the animation complete we used a custom script to export the animations as FBX files which were then imported onto the skeletal meshes created from the Project Library in RenderDigimania.

As we intended to use RenderDigimania’s light baking features we came up with two light rigs, one static light rig for the environments which would then be baked into light maps, and another dynamic light rig for the characters which could then be animated per shot. The lights for each group consisted of 3 directional lights, a key light, a fill light and a bounce light.

RenderDigimania’s lighting channels feature was integral in making this approach possible.

No. of rigid meshes: 236 No. of rigid mesh triangles: 2,469,928 No. of skeletal meshes: 3 No. of skeletal mesh triangles: 4,091,746 No. of triangles in total: 6,561,674 For each frame: 7 Render layers 5 Render passes 29 HD files created

No. of PCs: 1 CPU: Intel i7-3770, 3.4 GHz RAM: 8 Gb Graphics card: GeForce GTX 660

Size: 1920 x 1080 No. of frames: 1690 Total No. frames rendered: 44,250 Final render rate: 5 Frames per minute (145 HD files per min)

Like any other project the finishing touches were applied in post production.

Here’s what we worked on in After Effects:

• Improved and added soft shadows

• Small amount of colour corrections

• Added motion blur

• Added laser and teleport effects

• Added depth of field and shift of focus where needed