Animated TV series produced by Cromosoma using Autodesk Maya and Voice-O-Matic

For over 20 years, Barcelona-based Cromosoma has been a leader in TV programming, particularly with 2D cartoons.  As a socially responsible company, Cromosoma has lead the way in children’s programming based on strong values and eye appealing high-quality 2D animation to become one of the top companies in the audiovisual sector in both Spain and Europe. Cromosoma is known for the quality of its productions and the rights derived from them in terms of broadcasting, publishing and merchandising.

Cromosoma went into co-production with Pontas, Televisió de Catalunya and Televisión Española to create Asha, a 3D TV series of 52 episodes of 13 minutes each. The series explores the multicultural world we live in through the eyes of a bright young girl name Asha and her adventures with her friends.

Cromosoma team implemented their complete 3D animated series production pipeline in Autodesk Maya and to achieve a traditional cartoon look Cromosoma did rely on Maya's powerful shader tree.  “After several tests, we quickly decided to use Maya ramp shaders and the toon from PaintEffects to get the 2D look, this way we could control everything we needed for this production, do a good toon setup and have full control over it." clarify Óscar Márquez.

Márquez, coordinator of the 3D department explained: “We had to increase our deliverable by completing 4 episodes of 13 minutes per month. After we updated our internal tools and the efforts of our artists; it was necessary to find a tool integrated in Maya to help us with the tedious work of lip sync so we could focus our energy on acting. Voice-O-Matic was the right choice.”

Voice-O-Matic automates lip sync animations with any 3D character rig in any language and help reduce production time drastically. Voice-O-Matic from Di-O-Matic is available as plug-in for Autodesk 3ds max, Autodesk Maya as well as Autodesk Softimage.

Márquez and his team were able to easily implement Voice-O-Matic into their existing pipeline. “We had already done 10 episodes manually before implementing Voice-O-Matic and it was very easy to update our pipeline with Voice-O-Matic." Willy Nuez, IT manager reveals:  "During pre-production we had a chance to meet with the Di-O-Matic team, we brought to them an idea that could improve the integration of Voice-O-Matic into our production pipeline. A few days later, our wishes became reality with exactly what we needed. Now that's customer service!"

Márquez concludes: "Not only did we manage to increase our productivity, but it allowed us to focus on other aspects of the series to improve the final product. What we liked most about Voice-O-Matic is that it can be set up easily, the lip sync of several characters can be done at the same time and we barely need to modify the animation curves. If you make a good setup and integrate it properly you can have very good results. Thanks to Voice-O-Matic, we could do all the lip sync we needed in the series with just 10 mouth shapes and only one control for the most extreme poses.”

Web Links
To see a short preview of the series you can visit Asha webpage or visit Asha Catalan website.

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.