Situation
Digital Dimension is an Emmy award-winning
computer-generated imagery production studio. The studio
provides an end-to-end solution, from pre-production
planning and design, to on-set VFX supervision, through
production and post-production.
The
upcoming movie Hansel & Gretel is highlighted by
spectacular shots created with Facial Studio by
Digital Dimension.
"We had 3 artists working on those sequences for about 3
weeks." explains Ben Girard, President of Digital
Dimension. "The entire background, foreground trees, and
moving leaves were all computer generated and composited,
only the house and a few trees are live action elements."
The main action of those sequences revolves around a witch
that require complex facial animation.
Problem/Challenges
Creating compelling animations under tight budget
constraints is a fact of life for animation studios. The
animation solutions required to create a special effect
for a movie show must be stable and incur a minimum of
operational overhead.
Digital Dimension was asked to create a witch made of
smoke coming out of a chimney. "These shots called for a
trail of smoke coming out of a chimney that forms into a
face." says Benoit Girard. "The face then talks and scares
the kids. The 'smoke witch' is then blown and
pushed away by a Fairy."
"We
found out that we needed to match the actress' face."
explains Edmund Kozin, VP Technical Director. "We did not
want to use a 3d scan of the actress' face, we wanted to
have total controls over the style and the overall
animation". "We did not want to lock the director to a
particular style." adds Girard. " Facial studio
gave us a powerful and easy way to accommodate any
possible design changes. "
Solution/Benefits
Girard
and his team used Facial Studio for the challenging
task of reproducing the witch head coming out of a
chimney. "We also used Thinking Particles from
Cebas to
create smoke from the head created and animated within
Facial Studio." explains Kozin.
"In
order for our studio to use Facial Studio, its use
and learning curve had to be shorter than modeling the
witch's head the conventional way." says Girard. "In fact,
10 min after installing the program, we already had
created a head that resembled the actress. Facial
Studio is very intuitive! We then moved onto creating
morph targets for the animation using the muscles
deformers built into Facial Studio."
Facial animations of the witch sequences in Hansel &
Gretel have been significantly improved using muscles
deformers from Facial Studio as well as other
unique features. "Facial studio allowed us to
create the face parametrically and rapidly." says Ben
Girard.
From features that help artists to focus on creation, to
powerful deformations features that enable great animation
to be created in a very short amount of time, Di-O-Matic
software is helping Digital Dimension modelers and
animators realize amazing heads in no time. "The plethora
of options that Facial Studio offers opens up so
many doors and choices that we did not feel afraid of the
possible changes from the post-production crew." concludes
Girard.
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