Animating The Garfield Show

He’s the worlds most famous nap-taking, lasagna-loving, Monday-hating, dog-tormenting cat. Garfield thinks that cats are the most intelligent species in the world, maybe even the universe, and that everything in it, is there in some way to serve him. Despite his self-serving, and self centered nature, Garfield is really good at heart, and would never want anything to harm Jon and Odie.

The Garfield Show animated series entertain audience around the globe since 2008.

The Garfield Show is about Garfield’s day-to-day life, blending the look of CG animation and familiar humor of the orange tabby cat. This animated series has been delighting audiences worldwide since its debut on France 3 network in November 2008. In addition to the dozen countries already watching, Cartoon Network Japan will begin airing the TV series in 2010. According to Garfield cartoonist Jim Davis: "The show has been a delight to work on – the animation sparkles, and the stories are fun.”

Ellipsanime/Dargaud Media, a Paris-based animation and publishing company started production in 2008 to coincide with the strip's 30th anniversary, the show features the corpulent kitty and the world he lives in, including his owner, Jon Arbuckle, the happy-go-lucky pup Odie, the cloying “cutest kitten in the world,” Nermal, and Garfield’s permanent houseguest, Squeak the mouse.

The show is fully animated and rendered in Autodesk Softimage 64-bit, and to speed up the facial animation process while maintaining high-end result, the production team opted to implement automatic lipsynching with the help of Di-O-Matic solutions.

Cyrille Paulhiac, R&D reveals: "Voice-O-Matic brings to Ellipsanime/Dargaud-Media a fast and effective solution for all our characters lips sync. This flexible and effective technical solution, combined with an exemplary customer service, allows us to keep the pace of our series. Moreover, vomBatch is an amazing way to integrate this solution in a production pipeline."

Voice-O-Matic automates lip sync animations with any 3D character rig in any language and help reduce production time drastically as it creates a first animation pass that can easily be tweaked. Voice-O-Matic from Di-O-Matic is available as plug-in for Autodesk 3ds max, Autodesk Maya as well as Autodesk Softimage. More than 150 shots per episode of The Garfield Show are processed automatically with Voice-O-Matic and vomBatch, allowing the character animators to focus their energies on the character performance and emotions.

Once again, Di-O-Matic technologies helped artists bring unique CG characters to life, this time as a key component of the facial animation pipeline of The Garfield Show  animated series produced in France at Ellipsanime/Dargaud Media, adding Garfield and its friends to the list of famous CG characters like Spiderman, Lara Croft or Mickey Mouse that rely on Di-O-Matic technologies to come to life and entertain audience worldwide.

Web Links
Watch teasers of the animated series on the Garfield Show youtube channel or watch exclusive behind the scene videos to learn more on how the creation of the animated series.

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 3ds max and Maya.