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Animating Dr Contraptus
For Dr Contraptus the genius
inventor (also known as Leonard in many countries)
coming up with new ideas and concepts is an everyday
thing. But no genius is complete without his very own
sidekick… bring forth the lazy, the clumsy, the
maladroit Basil, who, in all of their adventures, has
the joy of testing some of these wacky
creations…needless to say, when the pair is at work,
everything really works according to their plans!... or
not…
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In 2010, Dr. Contraptus celebrates 35 years of success,
and 40 comic books with over 6 million copies sold in
over 15 languages.
At
Ellipsanime’s
Paris studios, around a hundred people have been working
on Dr. Contraptus in order to give the white-bearded
inventor free reign to torture his apprentice.
Ellipsanime worked closely with Turk and De Groot, the
series creators, to ensure the spirit of the show is
accurately represented.
The
animated series of 78 episodes of 7 minutes is fully
animated and rendered in Autodesk Softimage 64-bit and
to speed up the facial animation process while
maintaining high-end result, the production team opted
to implement automatic lip synching with the help of
Di-O-Matic solutions. |
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Voice-O-Matic automates lip
sync animations with any 3D character rig and language,
which helps reduce production time drastically, as it
creates a first pass animation that can easily be
tweaked. Voice-O-Matic from Di-O-Matic is available as
plug-in for Autodesk 3ds max, Autodesk Maya as well as
Autodesk Softimage.
Cyrille Paulhiac, R&D
reveals: "Voice-O-Matic brings to Ellipsanime/Dargaud-Media
a fast and effective solution for all our characters
lips sync. This flexible and effective technical
solution, combined with an exemplary customer service,
allows us
to keep the pace of our series. Moreover,
vomBatch is an amazing way to integrate this solution in
a production pipeline." |
The
78 episodes of the animated series were processed
automatically with Voice-O-Matic and vomBatch, allowing
the character animators to focus their energies on the
character performance and emotions while Di-O-Matic
solutions provides a first preliminary pass of
high-quality mouth timing animation.
Once again,
Di-O-Matic technologies helped artists bring unique CG
characters to life, this time as a key component of the
facial animation pipeline of Dr
Contraptus animated
series produced by Ellipsanime/Dargaud Media, adding the
well known genius inventor and his friends to the list
of famous CG characters like Pink Panther, Garfield or
Mickey Mouse that rely on Di-O-Matic technologies to
come to life and entertain audience worldwide.
Web Links
Visit Dr
Contraptus website and learn more about
the series.
Voice-O-Matic is available at $349, for more
info
visit
Voice-O-Matic's webpage or get the FREE trial
here.
Voice-O-Matic is also available for
Softimage and
Maya.
Léonard de Turk & de Groot avec la
participation de CANAL J / GULLI / ARANEO et les
Editions LE LOMBARD.
LEONARD ©2009 Ellipsanime, Canal J, GULLI and ARANEO. All rights reserved. |
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