AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Secrets of softimage3d1/27/2024 ![]() ![]() As he embarks on his eighth interesting year at Lucas Digital’slegendary effects company, the Lead Animator on such films as Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002) has played an early role in some seriously large projects. Otherwise, things can get kind of confusing.” If you can establish that early, it’s better for everyone, I think. “An early start on a character gives you a nice ramping-up period and an ideal chance to define exactly who the character will be. “I love to be involved at the very beginning of a project, when the animation is just starting,” says the veteran animator from his desk at ILM in San Rafael. Steve Rawlins admits that he likes to lead by example: The story of Harry Potter and SOFTIMAGE, however, is far from over. ILM is now deploying version 3.0 of the SOFTIMAGE|XSI environment on Linux workstations and servers throughout its production pipeline. It was fantastic, and I don’t think we could have done it any other way.” There was no geometry or animation controllers involved in the export, just the animation data. We were using XSI to perform the animation we wanted, but, when it came time to export, it was only an anim file. The character would then follow the motion capture moves. The anim file would then be imported back into SOFTIMAGE|3D and onto one of our character models. “Once we had a shot that we liked, we were able to pare it down into a compound that was exportable as a SOFTIMAGE|3D anim file. “SOFTIMAGE|XSI made it very easy to chop, cut and paste different pieces of motion and blend between them,” Kavanagh continues. Using the SOFTIMAGE|XSI Animation Mixer, the ILM team were then able to blend the individual moves together into one seamless, heart racing Quidditch play. “We took our SOFTIMAGE|3D scenes and imported them one at a time into SOFTIMAGE|XSI.” “We quickly realized that, if we wanted to blend the motion capture moves together, SOFTIMAGE|XSI was the only way to go,” says Kavanagh. Having a library of moves was one thing, but Kavanagh quickly found himself yearning for a way to tie various moves together and blend them into one seamless action. We gradually built up a library of highly realistic Quidditch moves.” By doing this, we were able to shoot a variety of different scenarios with the rider kicking, punching and that kind of thing. “We built a complete rig with a broom, and then had a rider in full mocap gear sit on it as stagehands moved it around. ![]() “For the second film, we wanted to add an element of motion capture to the Quidditch match,” says Kavanagh. To create the pulse racing Quidditch match scenes in Chamber of Secrets, for example, Lead Animator Paul Kavanagh and the visual effects team at ILM relied on the SOFTIMAGE|XSI Animation Mixer to mix digital doubles of the actors with a generic library of Quidditch moves. So, while Harry Potter has Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) behind him, ILM has SOFTIMAGE|XSI and SOFTIMAGE|3D on their side. In short, the film was an absolute blast, and for that we can thank, yet again, the extraordinary work of legendary effects facility Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), who have been stunning moviegoers for more than 28 years. Not only did it exceed its predecessor in virtually every area, but the visual effects were more spectacular, exciting and, yes, frightening than any other film I’ve seen. So it was with profound pleasure, then, that I watched the Chamber of Secrets when it opened last November. Such pressure, as we moviegoers know so well, often leads to the very worst kinds of cinematic disaster. In the case of last year’s wildly successful and fantastically fun Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the pressure was definitely on for this year’s follow-up, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, to blow the roof off a theater near you. ![]() It’s extremely rare that the second installment in a series surpasses its predecessor. ILM use SOFTIMAGE|XSI to score Quidditchpoints in “ Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.” With a library of mocap and the XSI animation mixer, these animation legends were able to blend individual moves together into one seamless, broom-flying heart-racing, Quidditchgame. ILM use SOFTIMAGE|XSI to score Quidditch points ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |