Bouncing 2D/3D balls.
Lecture Notes
How are you doing so far? I hope that you are getting used to the process and thinking up ways to combine the media and reasons why you should. Once you have everything broken down into the basic patterns of problems—2D leads, 3D leads, using cameras and textures to flatten 3D or using tones and shadows to round 2D (we’ll cover that soon), rendering in layers, compositing, and using masks—then it’s just a matter of finding the best ways to achieve your look with whatever techniques you need.
By now you have probably lost a little fear and do not believe that you need to stay in one package for your scenes; heavens, no. By now, you should be thinking in layers of images. You should be thinking that the output of any given software package is just an image and that your character is made up of multiple passes of images. Good, you have come far.
Often in class (or even the industry) I see those who become mesmerized with the 3D package. They get stuck in that 3D Cartesian world and think that everything has to be done there. Students get stuck into thinking that they need to render the whole frame in one go and overlook the concept of breaking things into levels. Breaking things into levels allows animators to use mattes in a compositing package to adjust colors and to isolate elements into levels so that if something needs to be tweaked or adjusted, they do not have to re-render the whole frame, just the one level. Ah, the time savings that process gives; it makes me happy.
The same thing goes for our characters, as we have found. They do not have to be stuck in one medium or software package. For many reasons, we have discovered you might want to use 3D to help along your 2D animation, whether it be to reduce line mileage or help with perspective and complexity of the character. We have focused on why one would use 3D. But why would one use 2D? Can’t everything be done in 3D nowadays? If I were in a classroom, in front of you, I would have a perplexed look on my face and would be trying hard not to let my sarcasm show. Yes, many things can be done in 3D. But should they be?
In my classrooms, the students have to produce a senior film (with a passing grade) or they do not graduate. I’m sure this is the case in many campuses: the films tend to be mono media. It is a monochromatic sea of 3D-ishness, and it all looks the same. Of course, if it were all 2D films it might look the same too because of similar animation style emulation in the curriculum. However, more than likely, it will not all be similar simply because of the different artists’ hands. I am generalizing, of course. The 3D work doesn’t all look exactly the same, but there is a trap that young artists can fall into. When they create something using the 3D tools, the same 3D tools that the next 500 artists are using, they become satisfied with what they see on screen and think that it is the vision they were after, when in actuality, it is the easiest thing that the tool has offered them and the other 500 to 1000 artists. Only the few, who know what their artistic vision is and push to make the software do their biddings, produce images that are not in that monochromic 3D sea. Because the tools produce some thing that can be labeled as the 3D package programmers’ artistic vision, those without their own clear artistic vision settle for the programmers’ vision. Even if you do not use 2D/3D in your independent films, at least, push beyond the programmers’ artistic vision. I will put away my soapbox.
On our campus, only in the past few years after introducing this 2D/3D class, I have seen the nonmono films created. It is nice to see this transition. I hope that we will see more. I’m counting on you to try things and post it on the website at www. hybridanimation.com (I have a quota for how many times I have to remind you about the URL.) We must break free from the monochromatic sea. How did I get back up on this soapbox?
We have done a 2D character with 3D parts, where the 2D character leads. Now we will turn our attention to a 3D character with 2D parts, where the 3D character leads. The question to ask then is, why use 2D parts?
Why indeed should we use 2D? With enough time for research and development, nearly anything can be done in 3D that can be done in 2D.Human characters do not have to be done in 2D, because they can be accomplished in 3D. Fuzzy characters do not have to be done in 2D. 3D has come a long way. So it isn’t exactly the subject matter that decides the medium. What was that? The student in the back row, you had an answer? Yes. You are correct. The look, supporting the artistic vision, is a great reason to choose 2D over 3D. You have been listening. Very good. This is my point: once the student or young filmmaker gets beyond the thought process that the programmer’s artistic vision is a good one, simply because it is easier to push a button, then that filmmaker can grow into seeing which method will best support his or her own personal artistic vision.
Then you can start to see that sometimes 2D can be the answer. We’ll look at some industry and student examples further on in this topic. First, let’s categorize some reasons you might decide to use 2D over 3D.
Line Look
What if you truly needed to have a certain style of line that currently can’t be replicated with 3D toon lines? Perhaps you need a lovely cleanup thick and thin line. Perhaps you want a scratchy hand-painted line? Possibly you could create it with 3D, but that brings us to the next reason. Read on.
Time
Sometimes it takes less time to draw it than it does to do all of the research and development to figure out how to do a given thing in 3D. We’ll examine the element of time in the industry examples section.
Animation style
Another reason that might tip the scales toward 2D instead of 3D is to match a given animation style. It might be easier to animate in 2D.
Whatever the reason, it sometimes is the hardest decision to make, to add in 2D. We love our 3D shiny buttons and widgets. It is hard to stop and wonder if it would be easier, look better, or possibly take less time than it would take for the research and development department to draw the assets. Did I just say 2D could cost less than 3D? If you consider how much time it can take to test, develop, and render 3D assets to look like what you want, then yes, 2D can cost less. I’m referring to more risky 3D assets, which possibly you have not done before or that are highly technical like water, goo, dynamics, and so on.
Industry Examples
The hydra from Disney’s Hercules is a good example of when 2D was used to get it right. When the hydra’s heads grow from the stump where the previous head was severed, there is an eruption of goo. The hydra was a 3D element in a 2D film. The animators used flat shading on it, with tones and highlights. There were rendered toon lines done with Renderman. (In that day, you had to work hard to have toon lines.) For the goo that was to erupt from the stump, they investigated 3D particle systems. They spent a long time trying to get the particles to look right. It wasn’t working. Finally the look development supervisor had a wonderful idea. She asked, “Can we do it in 2D instead?” It looked great. The animators did a simple 2D EFX element of goo and composited it into the shot.
Now that you are getting used to the idea of 2D/3D animation, it may not seem that odd to you to consider drawing a 2D element on top of a 3D element. Four topics ago you might not have so easily come to the idea of putting 2D goo on top of 3D. There’s no turning back now. It is just an image. Anything goes to get that animation on the screen.
Recently I wandered through a room where Dreamwork’s Spirit was being played. It had been a while since I had looked at that film. It is a great example of 2D/3D mixtures. The sequence playing was one in which the lead horse falls into a river. ( Why animal movies, both animated and live action, have to always douse animals in raging rivers, I do not know.) As the horse struggled in the 3D water, his splashes were 2D. It worked pretty well to have the 2D splashes at the contact point of the 2D horse and the 3D water. To have 3D perfect water around a flat 2D horse would have drawn attention to the contact point and drawn attention away from the action of the scene.
I have another Disney example that I lived through. For Fantasia 2000’s Pines of Rome sequence, the animators worked hard to develop 3D whales. They were lovely whales; you can check out the DVD to see them. The story is a cute tale about a baby whale and his adventures while trying to fly with his parents. There were a few elements in that sequence that could not be executed very well in 3D at the time. In 1995, 3D was not the best at a few things. The first element that was not convincing in 3D was the eyes for the whales, and the second element was the water splashes. Both elements were done in 2D. The 3D whales were printed, pegged up on paper, and used by the 2D artist as reference. I’ll assume that there was some hand adjusting of the 2D eyes in the compositing software at the end of the process if there were any registration issues. The eyes were drawn in 2D, and the water splashes were not only drawn in 2D, they were drawn in an older style of EFX animation with the side of the pencil instead of drawing outlines. A similar style was used in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence in the original Fantasia.
For months I watched these sequences as they went through animation. I didn’t even work at Disney at the time. I worked at Dreamworks. After getting off work I would drive to Flower Street to take dinner to my spouse, who worked as a cleanup artists in the character department by day and did overtime in EFX at night. He was in crunch time then and was working overtime drawing those whale eyes and water splashes. It was a huge undertaking and turned out very well. I marveled at the roto prints of the 3D whales. For some shots they were printed out on 24 field paper, and the artists had to draw eyes on that large 24 field paper. I wish I knew for sure, but I’m confident that animating on 24 field paper (which is incredibly huge) had to have caused some slight registration issues. Imagine these huge pieces of paper that were twice the size of normal animation paper and the only thing on them were a couple of small whale eyes. I’m not sure why they were using 24 field paper. Usually when you are drawing a small image on a large background, you can draw on smaller paper and composite the drawing into the correct place. I’m sure there was a reason.
Hands-on Examples
I run a group project class at least once a year. In 2008, the group project was very successful for such a small team. I’m proud to say we placed in the Daytona Film Festival, the Savannah Film
Festival, and the Atlanta Film Festival. The group project for 2009 was of a slightly larger scope, and our team size doubled. At the start of the project I knew that I wanted it to line up to produce artwork for this topic. So I put onto the group one restriction: the character had to be a 2D/3D character. At first I worried that forcing a restriction like that would hamper the creative process or it would be forced onto the story with no reason. The rules the team came up for the use of 2D and 3D was this: organic = 2D, nonorganic = 3D. I thought this was an interesting concept. We’ll take a look at a sequence that exemplifies those rules and the 2D/3D process.
Jaguar McGuire: Cape on Fire Sequence
The short group project film that we came up with for 2009 is titled Jaguar McGuire. It is a story about a conflict between a cat and his owner. The cat owner is none other than Jaguar McGuire, who, the audience finds out in the opening shot, is a daredevil. They also realize quickly that he must have had bad fortune in his career as he is in a body cast. The second shot shows Jaguar looking longingly at his cape and seemingly reminiscing over his career, which, as a newspaper headline reminds him, is definitely over. Just as we are feeling sorry for poor Jaguar McGuire, we realize that his troubles are far from over as we hear the first of many hundreds of meows that come from his cat. This troubled cat owner’s cat still requires the things that cats need. How will Jaguar quell the meowing? What ensues is a physical comedy that is sure to have you laughing.
During the struggles, there is a sequence where the cat climbs on top of Jaguar’s body cast. Jaguar has one free leg and tries to kick the cat off. Unfortunately, the cat jumps off just before the leg connects and instead of kicking the cat, Jaguar kicks his own injured leg out of the sling. The momentum propels his leg off the side of the bed and knocks over his table, which launches a vase of water (in slow motion) through the air. The vase crashes and short-circuits an electrical outlet. The sparks, sadly, catch the hem of the cape on fire. Jaguar watches in helpless horror as the flames burst up the length of the cape. Being a daredevil, Jaguar believes he can stop the fire and uses his only free foot to try to stomp the flames.
We’ll take a look at how the characters came to being in the 2D/3D process for this sequence. Many individuals were involved in the creation of this short animated film. We started with a team of 14 that met weekly in the classroom for 10 weeks and then worked with many more artists outside of the classroom as we continued through production and postproduction.
JAGUAR
Many designs by students were turned in for the main character Jaguar McGuire. Our art director, Jason Walling, compiled different ideas and ultimately came up with the page of design ideas you see in Figure 5.1. The character design allowed for a 2D leg, 2D head, and 2D wiggling toes and thumbs, all else on Jaguar being in a cast is 3D. You’ll note that the face and leg are completely encased in bandages. It took some convincing, but we finally came to the agreement that at least the leg would not be covered in bandages. The reason for minimizing the bandages is that 2D bandages are incredibly hard to keep up with when animating, and the cleanup on them would make it difficult to manage quality control. Anyone who has gone through 2D animation classes has probably heard the evils of stripes, long flowing hair, prints on clothing, complicated ribbon work, and the like. All of these items can contribute to a more complex cleanup line, which if not managed well can cause strobing, jiggle, or otherwise distract from the animation. The bandages on the face stayed, because those were important to keep up the high level of frustration needed throughout the film.
Our director, Clint Donaldson, took the concept and began working on ideas of how the 2D and 3D would work together. In
FIGURE 5.1 Jaguar McGuire character design.
Figure 5.2, you see a visual target created by Clint that is our first depiction of a 2D Jaguar body inside of a 3D cast. From the very beginning, the idea of a 3D cast that was simply immovable backed our story of this trapped stuntman. It fit the story and I was pleased that the restriction I originally gave did not end up feeling like it was retrofitted into the story.
For the first 10 weeks of production we had a class of 14 individuals. Many were tasked with modeling and texturing. The 3D cast rig was created along with a 3D version of the head and leg to be used as reference for the 2D animation.
FIGURE 5.2 Jaguar McGuire’s 2D/3D visual target.
Figure 5.3a is a shot of the room with Jaguar’s prone body on the bed. Because this was a production pipeline with many individuals involved, we utilized the reference concept for everything. The model and the rig file were all referenced into the main blocked Maya scenes. This way the scenes could be pushed through the pipeline before the models or rigs were completed. As the modelers finished the higher-resolution versions of the models, they updated the reference files. Then as the riggers finished rigging the files, those were updated. From the animator’s point of view, they animated a block version of the character in a block room one day and as the production went along the room they referenced in became more high resolution and filled out until it was a completed room ready to render.
FIGURE 5.3a Jaguar McGuire 3D model. Head and leg are 2D reference stand-ins.
The animation was completed in Maya. The animators chose to animate the 3D stands-ins completely to better visualize the animation. Figure 5.3a shows keyframes of the 3D animation including the stand-in leg. The stand-in for the head is a low-res version. This was the rig that was pushed through earlier on in production. Later on in the production, a higher-res 3D head was developed to allow more perspective help for the 2D animators (Figure 5.3c). This higher-res head was necessary for other shots where we did a crazy zolly shot (a right of passage, according to the artists). A zolly shot on a 2D/3D character, though, is very challenging. Another thing that the higher-res head gave us was the ability to cast shadows on the head and pull those shadows to composite overtop of our 2D character. We’ll look at that technique in the topic on EFX.
The animation was done normally in Maya, creating a character set and setting keyframes as you are used to. Also, the twos.mel script was used to make sure that the animation was on twos. You can see a playblast of the animation of the 3D character in the file 3DLeads2D_3Danim.avi. This playblast from Maya shows the controls from the rig as well. It was a simple rig, as no deformations were on the cast itself. It was debated whether or not to add them. In the end we decided that for comic effect we would try it without any deformations.
Upon completion of the 3D animation, Clint brought the animation into Flash to rough out the 2D animation. Clint and Jason, the two directors of the group project, preferred creating their rough 2D animation in Flash because it is easier to set up keyframes in the timeline and adjust timing. They were not familiar with animating in Photoshop.
FIGURE 5.3b Jaguar McGuire’s 3D low-res head referenced into the animator’s scene.
FIGURE 5.3c Jaguar McGuire’s 3D high-res head referenced into the animator’s scene.
They also liked working with the timelines and being able to adjust the timing of their 2D easily by moving keyframes in Flash. You can open the Flash file to see the layering used and the rough 2D animation drawn overtop of the 3D in the file Shot41-43_2DRough.fla, found in the companion data. This is the sequence animated by Clint Donaldson.
FIGURE 5.4 2D rough animation drawn in Flash.
Not all animators in the group project were able to do both the 2D and the 3D animation. Clint and Jason both were able to, and they handled the total animation of each of their shots. The cleanup, originally, was to be handed off to our team of volunteer cleanup artists. Using the standard round brush inside of Photoshop, they were to complete the cleanup pass of the character. However, it was found that the animators had fairly clean lines in their animation. Most of the cleanup was completed in Flash with a very small brush.
