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.
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