Situation

Character animation is an art. It is the art of giving life to a character. Creating art requires talent and the right tools for the job... Rainbow Studios can bring life to whatever a project needs, from a stylized cartoon character, to inhuman monsters or photorealistic people.

Members of Rainbow's character animation team focus on one or more key disciplines such as keyframe animation, facial animation and motion capture. Many projects require a combination of these techniques and Rainbow's team is adept at integrating them seamlessly.

Donner is much more than just another CG Cartoon. This is a Christmas special which is rich in emotions and is highlighted by amazing facial animation created with Morph-O-Matic.

"We started Donner in June of 2001 with ten artists/animators and finished at the end of October of 2001." says Chris Baranowski, supervising animator at Rainbow Studios. "We started animation in the beginning of September so we completed the 22 minutes of animation in about 8 weeks. We worked well into the night and weekends not only to finish on time but to deliver the best show we could."

Problem/Challenges

Creating the most compelling animation under tight budget constraints is a fact of life for animation studios. The animation solutions required to create a TV show must be affordable and incur a minimum of operational overhead.

"It's extremely difficult to replicate in 3d the style and flair that is attainable in 2d." explains Boyd Lake, character animator at Rainbow Studios. "Morph-O-Matic was essential to reaching the goals we set."

"We choose to use Morph-O-Matic mainly for the ability to do progressive morphing, something 3ds max's morpher lacks" says Chris Baranowski, supervising animator at Rainbow Studios. "Without the ability to do progressive morphing it would have been near impossible to achieve what we set out to do on Donner."

Solution/Benefits

Baranowski and his team used the progressive morphing features in Morph-O-Matic for the challenging task of creating cartoony and exaggerated deformations for the characters facial animations. "Progressive Morphing was essential to Donner because of the design of the characters. Specifically the eyes of these characters are huge and in the case of the reindeer, they sit on top of the characters' heads. There is no decent way to pull an eyelid around the eye for blinking without progressive morphing. We also used progressive morphing for a few of the extreme morphing controls, like the "oooo" target, for example" says Lake.

"MOM is pretty straight forward, so there wasn't any significant amount of time spent trying to learn how to use it," says Baranowski. " Even setting up the progressive targets is really straight forward."

Character facial animations in Donner have been significantly improved using progressive morphing from Morph-O-Matic as well as other unique features. "Some of the simpler UI functions were nice like Key Selected Channels, and Zero All Channels, as well as being able to tear off the panel to maximize screen space." says Baranowski.. "The tear-away animation controls panel was also very helpful as we had many characters with multiple morph control panels." concludes Lake.

From features that help a team to work faster together, to powerful morphing features that enable great deformations to be created, Di-O-Matic software is helping Rainbow animators realize their wildest ideas. "MOM is helping us do things we never could achieve otherwise" concludes Baranowski.

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

All images created by Rainbow Studios.  Courtesy & Copyright (c) 2001 TV Loonland AG