Situation

When you win 4 Emmy Awards for best visual effects you have a reputation to stand by. This studio specialized in Visual Effects, 3D Animation, and Motion Graphics for the film, television, and interactive industries, continue to delivers. Digital Dimension continues to amaze audiences with impressive special effects including their latest work on The Exorcist The beginning.  

The company located in Burbank, California, was not scared of scaring audiences in this new project. To achieve their astonishing 3D character animation they capitalized on Morph-O-Matic.

Problems / Challenges

On this mind-blowing and gory project, a part of Digital Dimension job was to create more than realistic crows in key moments of the movie. To conceive those horrifying crows they worked with 3ds Max and Morph-O-Matic. “We had to work on a tight schedule for The Exorcist: The beginning and we had to fashion realistic wings with a mind-blowing look; it was a real problem. We needed to use Morph target to accomplish our mission”, says Kim Richardson, lead animator on the project.
 

Solutions / Benefits

Digital Dimension did not loose a minute and turn to Di-O-Matic plug-ins to help them achieving their project. Morph-O-Matic was the perfect solution they where looking for to increase their productivity. As Mathieu Di Muro, one of Digital Dimension 3D animators who worked on the project said, “Due to the complexity of the project and the tight schedules; without Morph-O-Matic, we would probably have not finished within our production timelines.” In Morph-O-Matic, they were able to easily blend shapes together, put them in a negative value, separate shapes into groups which fasten their production. “I found that working with Morph-O-Matic enabled me to animate my characters much more faster than using any other Morphing tool.” says Kim.

On The Exorcist: The beginning one of the huge challenges was the crows’ wings. Making unrealistic wings with mechanical behavior would have revealed the non-authenticity of the crows to the audience. “With the progressive morph we were able to keep the wings volume and give it a natural and realistic movement. No other morphing tools provides such a thrilling option.” tells Mathieu. This feature saved a lots of headaches to the Digital team and let them focus on striking character animation creation.

“In Morph-O-Matic, saving the .mom file with the options to save the geometry, the parameters...etc, are great! We can tell when re-loading his animation if shapes are missing, and keep the negative values if he had used them in his animation. The floating menu is great when you need all the space to animate your character, you can move the efficient floating panel to the other monitor. I like the fact that you can group your shapes. Morph-O-Matic is an awesome and powerful tool.” conclude Kim Richardson.

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