Pascal Blais Production creates impressive CG Character with Morph-O-Matic

Situation
Imagine that you’re part of an Academy Award winning Production Company that has just landed a large commercial for the popular yogurt brand Dannon. The vision for this lively spot calls for the intermixing of a live action boy and a CG dinosaur, along with a host of emotions from both. That’s the task as was presented to Pascal Blais Productions, one of the coolest and most prominent production facilities in Montreal, Canada. “The commercial was to begin with a 6-year old boy in his bedroom getting ready to eat a small Danonino,” explained Stéphane Côté, who acted as the Lead Artist for the project. “Suddenly he hears a strange sound and out from his closet jumps a computer generated green dinosaur. The two are then propelled through the boy’s house and ultimately end up outside laughing where the child finally tastes the product.”

Problem/Challenges
While the production schedule given was fairly long (twelve weeks), one of the biggest hurdles that needed to be overcome was the fact that the company had seldom needed to rely on morph tools before and faced the daunting task of learning a new product just so they could complete the spot. “It was the first time that we used these new morph tools in our production pipeline, and that was definitely scary. For those of us who work into this industry, we all know how stressfull it can be to try and learn a new tool while you’re in the middle of a production, “ said Côté. “Every moment is precious and if you make the wrong choice, you have to scramble at the end.”

Solution/Benefits
At first, the Pascal Blais team looked at the built-in morphing tools, but quickly realized that they needed more control. “Initially we thought that the job could be done with the basic tools in 3ds max. But we discovered right away that without the progressive morphing options, the ability to save and load animation data files, the vertex soft-selection support and other options that Morph-O-Matic offered, we’d waste a lot of our precious production time. We needed a better tool.”

And this decision to use Morph-O-Matic proved to be a huge benefit for Stéphane and his team. Not only were they able to learn MoM quickly, it cut down dramatically on the amount of work they needed to do to get excellent results. “Since the spot only called for our dinosaur character to show emotions like joy, fear and surprise, and that we didn’t have to do any lip-sync, we were able to build around seven basic shapes and mix them together to get a dynamic range of expressions! The tool worked exceptionally well and helped us deliver the job,” concluded Côté.

With award-winning tools like Morph-O-Matic and the ability to deliver advanced options for companies like Pascal Blais Productions, Di-O-Matic is an obvious choice for professionals and casual users alike. “The kinds of tools that Di-O-Matic provides gives artists the ability to work with a maximum amount of flexibility,” exclaimed Côté.
 

Web Links
Morph-O-Matic is available at $249, for more info visit Morph-O-Matic's webpage or get the FREE trial here.