Situation
When
you’re one of the best visual effects shops in town, you
usually get some big clients knocking at your door. Blur
Studio, based in Venice California, has definitely earned
its reputation from the quality of its work and the
dedication of its artists, and the knock on the door came
last year from Paramount Parks and Nickelodeon when they
approached Blur with the idea of producing “a
stereoscopic, computer-animated ride film based on the
wildly popular Nickelodeon cartoon series SpongeBob
SquarePants” according to
Sherry Wallace, Blur’s Producer for the project.
The 4 and a half minute ride was to make its debut
at Paramount Parks Theme Parks across
North America in 2002 and has since being distributed in many
themes park across the globe.
Problems / Challenges
Of course, on a job this big,
there were significant hurdles to overcome. First and
foremost, Blur was given the daunting task of taking the
original 2D elements and converting them into 3D while not
losing the originals’ quality. Add to that the fact that
they had 15 unique characters to model and animate,
including six who had speaking parts. Blur’s CG Supervisor
Paul Taylor recalls, “For the characters who had dialogue,
we had to use morph targets for all the facial
lip-syncing.”
Solutions / Benefits
Blur
immediately began to look at tools that could help
increase their productivity, and Morph-O-Matic soon
came to their attention. As Sze Chan, one of Blur’s
modelers and character riggers who worked on the project
knew, “Without a tool like Morph-O-Matic,
we would
have had to transfer animation for each channel inside of
Track View.” Instead, Blur was able to do things not
previously possible with the built-in tools and in far
less time. And on such a massive project, time was
critical. Fortunately, both Chan and Taylor agreed that
the product had “No learning curve”, and that they were up
and running in less than a day. That was also especially
important for Blur’s Lead Character Animator, Marlon Nowe.
“Morph-O-Matic provided a faster solution with more
possibilities, a better interface, and nice floaters with
sliders,” he said, “You need smooth playback while
animating facial animation and Morph-O-Matic provided it.”
And Chan
echoed her workmate’s sentiments on the ease of use,
“Beyond the number of channels that Morph-O-Matic
could display at once, the other nice feature was its
capability to open multiple floaters for different
characters and animate them all at once.” This saved the
Blur team lots of unneeded aggravation and let them focus
on the task of producing stunning character output for
Paramount Parks.
Nowe
summed up his experiences with Morph-O-Matic on the
SpongeBob SquarePants ride pretty simply, “Its faster and
smoother than any other existing morphing solution for 3ds
max.”
Web Links
Watch the trailer!
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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