RockFish: Blur Lands A Big One

RockFish represents the latest calling card from Blur Studioof Venice, Calif. Creating the over-the-top, comic action-adventure ofthis nine-minute computer animated piece took about four months. Usinginhouse short films as vehicles to test new techniques is a venerabletradition in the evolving field of CG, and RockFish lives up tothat tradition.

RockFish is a fishing story, Blur co-founder Tim Miller,says. Miller also wrote and directed the short film. “It's really‘The Old Man and the Sea’ set in the desert. The premise isthat huge fish swim in the lava beneath the surface of a farawayplanet. An ‘exterminator’ character uses an elaborate rigto drill a hole to catch the mother of all Rockfish.”

Miller says that this is a “buddy pix,” because theprotagonist has a sidekick critter that looks like a cross between amonkey and a dog. The final con-frontation in the film begins with whatMiller calls “the hardest shot.”

“The Rockfish starts to come up out of the sand and uses itsclaws to try to pull these characters down,” Miller says.“This shot has both character animation and probably 12 layers ofeffects.”

Blur began with multiple animatics created in Discreet's 3ds Max.“The 3D animatics kept evolving almost up to the day wefinished,” Miller says. “We didn't have the luxury offinishing one part before moving on to another. We started modelingthings like trucks, which we knew wouldn't change regardless of wherethe camera was. For the environment, we built ‘kits’ ofelements — like 20 different kinds of rocks — that could beput together at the last minute.”

A fairly tight animatic did exist before Blur commenced a hybridprocess of mo-cap/keyframe character animation. Using Vicon andKaydara's MotionBuilder software, they motion-captured every-thing, butthen deleted lots of the data they'd captured. By keeping only everythird or fifth keyframe, they wound up with a kind of ‘motionsketch.’ The animators then did keyframe animation on top ofthat, again using 3ds Max. For the character animators, says Miller,“it wasn't quite as heinous as just tweaking curves in mo-cap.They actually got to throw in a little creativity. At the same time,this approach retained some of the nuances that you get from motioncapture.”

Along with the main animation, they used the 3ds Max plug-in calledStitch to handle the sim animation of things like the main character'sclothing and his sidekick's floppy ears. Blur was able work efficientlyon different parts of the project simultaneously by using software in3ds Max called Point Cache, which allowed them to save and update dataefficiently. When an animator passed on a piece of animation, forexample, this software would automatically update the scene assemblyfile. “There was no delay,” says Blur's Kevin Margo, whooversaw Rockfish's scene assembly. “The animator wouldsimply send an email saying, ‘The point cache is updated; you canrender it.’ That cut down time.”

For rendering, Blur used both Brazil Rendering System software andthe scanline renderer in 3ds Max. “The environmental elements,the characters, and the vehicle were rendered in Brazil,” saysMargo. “One thing we used for lighting the characters was the GISkylight option — it's kind of a fake radiosity. It saved us lotsof time in the end. We used the scanline renderer for the atmosphericpasses, the effects passes, and the sky backgrounds.”

“The scanline renderer in Max is still quite efficient,”says Miller, “and there are lots of situations where you don'tneed Brazil. In fact, you're wasting CPU cycles if you use it. Thereare instances where it's faster to render the back-grounds with thescanline renderer and render the characters in Brazil. That's what amulti-pass approach allows you to do.”

They also used a tool called Render Elements, which is a Max scriptposted on the Blur website. It enabled them to save all the propertiesnecessary to get multiple shadow passes in a single shot without havingto reset lights each time. It basically saved ‘the state ofMax’ for every pass — a useful timesaver in a shot with 12passes.

Not all the elements in RockFish were 3D-CG. For the swirlingsand effects in this desert fight, Blur used a combination of 3Dvolumetric smoke and stock footage on 2D cards. “If the cameraisn't moving a whole lot,” says Margo, “you don't noticethat something is a flat card. In some cases we didn't even put thosecards in Max — we'd just comp them in [Eyeon Software's] DigitalFusion.”

Facing the challenge of compositing the film's 120 shots in aboutthree weeks, Blur developed a “template” Digital Fusionfile that they could basically plug each shot into. At the end of thisprocess came color correction and any stylistic touches that theywanted to apply to the images. They used Adobe Photoshop and edited inPremiere.

Of all the software used in RockFish, Miller singles out aprogram called FrameCycler (from Iridas) as being a huge asset. Itworks by loading film resolution frames into RAM, and allows you toplay them back in realtime. “You can even load two sequences andthey'll play side-by-side so you can check continuity issues. I spentmore time in FrameCycler reviewing stuff than in any other piece ofsoftware.”

The need to be efficient while producing a “labor oflove” project like RockFish has helped Blur advance itsdata management tools and further streamline its character pipeline.The studio can now keep working on character animation much later intothe process than ever before. “What we've done withRockFish is being implemented in all our new projects,”Margo says. “So in the end, it pays off.”

Tim Miller - Writer/Director
Jeremy Cook - Visual Effects Supervisor/Art Director
Sherry Wallace - Producer
Jeff Weisend - Animation Supervisor
Heikki Anttila, Irfan Celik, Jeremy Cook, Jerome Denjean, Kevin Margo- Modelers
Kevin Margo, Jerome Denjean, Heikki Anttila - SceneAssembly
David Nibbelin - Layout
John Bunt, Jeff Weisend - Mo-Cap Supervisors
Daniel Perez Ferreira, Seung Jae Lee, Kirby Miller - VisualEffects
Jon Jordan, Paul Hormis - Technical Directors