Blur Studio, based in Venice California, has definitely earned its reputation from the quality of its critically acclaimed work and the dedication of its artists to create stunning CG characters. In 2006 Blur Studio has created, amongst many other productions, the cinematic sequences for Sonic the Hedgehog and Shadow the Hedgehog video games.

For many years now, Morph-O-Matic has been the morphing engine of choice at Blur Studio when animating CG characters. "We use Morph-o-Matic as the morphing tool on all our 3DS Max based character rigs.” reveals Leo Santos, lead animator at Academy nominated Blur Studio. “Morph-O-Matic is simple and flexible enough so we can combine it with custom rig solutions very easily.”

Morph Toolkit, a unique combination of tools to assist artist in the creation of morph targets was also a time saver at Blur Studio as Santos confesses: “Another favorite is the Copy-O-Matic modifier from Morph ToolKit, which has saved my life a few times already.”

"To me, the best features of Morph-O-Matic are how you can organize the shapes into groups, and how easy it is to transfer information from one scene to another. It's also good to remember that it's simple and flexible enough so you can combine it with custom rig solutions (like special controls on top of the morph animation)." explains Santos.

"One particular challenge we had on the Sonic opening cinematic (and the Shadow the Hedgehog cinematics) is the fact that Sonic's mouth is sometimes on the side, sometimes on the middle. We did a special setup with Morph-O-Matic that allowed us to "reset" the neutral pose to the side or to the center using one Morph-O-Matic modifier, then apply the shape animation on top of that with another Morph-O-Matic, and it worked well, we could start the scene with the mouth on the side and then slide it to the middle without much trouble." reveals Leo Santos, Animation Supervisor for the Sonic cinematics at Blur Studio.

Once again Di-O-Matic prove their technologies reliability in production, this time as a key component of the facial animation pipeline of an all time classic game character : Sonic the hedgehog.

Read more on Morph-O-Matic and Morph ToolKit

Visit the website of the game  : www.sega.com/gamesite/sonicnext/
Visit Blur Studio website : www.blur.com

All images courtesy of Blur Studio and SEGA