SpongeBob SquarePants

A 2D Toon Takes A 3D Ride

One: Storyboard of SpongeBob SquarePants.

On Nickelodeon, SpongeBob SquarePants is a 2D celanimatedhit. But with the debut of Paramount Parks' SpongeBob SquarePants ridefilm, the popular blockhead is being given — literally —another dimension. Blur Studios of Venice, Calif., has created a 41/2-minute simulator film in stereoscopic 3D CGI, for projection in5-perf, 70mm. “It had to feel, sound, and look like a biggerversion of the TV show — in 3D,” co-director Yas Takatasays of the challenge.

Paul Taylor, Blur animation supervisor and co-director with Takata,admits it's an unusual hybrid. “We're taking traditional 2D celanimation and turning it into 3D animation, but then we're toon shadingit and turning it back into a 2D character. Then it's being shown in 3Dstereo, so it's really going back and forth,” he says.

Generating the elements in three dimensions was essential to createa stereoscopic film, he says. “You really need to have thedistances be accurate in order to simulate the stereo effect, and tohave the characters sitting properly in space. Because this ride filmis basically going in z-depth, we really had to pay close attention tothe art direction. We had to add depth while staying true to the show'sflat art look.”

Two: Creating a fairly sophisticated animatic was one of the firststeps.

Blur enlisted several of the creators of the TV show whiledeveloping the film in order to ensure the tone was right. For Blur'sanimators, the first step was to create a fairly sophisticatedanimatic, which was animated in 3ds Max and edited with Adobe Premiere.The animatic wasn't in stereo and didn't contain the characters'lip-synch, but it worked out the timing and the arc of the story. Italso indicated the virtual camera movements, which sometimes drop theaudience's POV steeply downward.

Animating and texturing the show's 15 characters — includingsix with speaking parts — was a labor-intensive process.“For the characters who have dialogue,” says Taylor,“we had to do morph targets for all the facial lipsynching.”

SpongeBob's unconventional body presented some unique 3D characterchallenges as well, recalls animator Derron Ross. “We did lots ofcustom character rigs because he's not your standard bipedal shape.He's got arms that can bend like an elbow, or become noodly. Ourmodeler and character rigger set it up so we could morph his arms intoeither shape.”

In addition to modeling the characters, sets, and props, Blur had togenerate a sizable number of effects, including sparks and bubbles.These were generated in 3ds Max's particle system software. Texturemaps were also created using Adobe Photoshop. Then all the elementswere merged into the scene. As Taylor explains, “It's kind oflike compositing, but in 3D. From that we render out the layers tocomposite. We use Eyeon's Digital Fusion for compositing.”

Three: 3ds Max screenshot.

In rendering the “toon-shaded” look, Blur faced one ofthe most challenging tasks. Rather than use 3ds Max's scanlinerenderer, the studio used the Brazil rendering system fromSplutterfish. Although best known as a raytracer, Brazil offered a lotof control, Taylor says. “It not only was used for reflectionsand refractions, but it also determined things like the placement oflines and how the width of the lines should change overdistance,” he says. “If you imagine rotating an object in3D space, a lot of software will draw a line on the periphery. But forSpongeBob, you only want a line where a 2D animator would draw a line.So we were able to tell the software, ‘This is where we want aline. Never put a line there.’ To help us with this project,Splutterfish actually wrote some advance control software, which willship with the next release of Brazil.”

Ross recalls that this process required lots of refining on ascene-by-scene basis. “SpongeBob had to look good from manydifferent angles. The other issue was that because the film is 2K wehad much larger resolution, and every little flaw shows up. It was verytime-intensive, but what animation isn't?”

Four: 3ds Max screenshot of the wireframe model.

While it would have been impractical to view the images inlarge-format stereo during production, the Blur team was able to checkthe inter-ocular effects on their monitors in small chunks of about 300frames at a time. “We wore polarized glasses that hooked up tothe computer and we loaded the images into RAM. We had a techniquewhere we actually split the images and then married them back togetherso we could preview everything,” Taylor explains.

“Fortunately,” adds Takata, “what we saw on an18in. monitor translated pretty accurately to a large screen. It toldus that if we had trouble there, we'd have trouble on the big screen.Which was good because we wouldn't have had the time to keep filming itout.”

Five: Final composite.

While SpongeBob SquarePants will debut on 5/70 film, Blur isprepared to deliver it in other formats that Paramount may want in thefuture. “The great thing about this being digital,” Takataobserves, “is that if they want it in some format like HD, we'vegot all the files and we can output it any way they want.”