With less than two months to go before the submission deadline for
SIGGRAPH 2008, the Remnant team has high hopes their CG short
‘Sheridan’s Unfolding’ will showcase before thousands of viewers this
summer. In fact, did you know a ‘Best of Show Award’ at SIGGRAPH makes
you a candidate for an Academy Award? The Remnant team has
high hopes and is privileged to have the opportunity to compete with
industry leaders.
This month Remnant Studios submitted their teaser trailer for
‘Sheridan’s Unfolding’ – a 3D photorealistic CG short showcasing the
latest technologies of the 3D pipeline, much like last fall’s film
Beowulf by Robert Zemeckis and next year’s film Avatar by James
Cameron. What makes Remnant Studios’ pipeline unique is laser scanning
sets, actors, and props into 3D models which can be further manipulated
in 3D software packages. Usually a team of modelers is employed to
generate the 3D objects necessary to create and animate a film, however,
this is a time consuming and expensive process; so by laser scanning the
elements, a studio can significantly cut pre-production, production, and
post-production costs, thus giving content creators and/or directors
more creative control over their projects while allowing producers to
stay within budget.
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Furthermore, by using the latest motion capture technologies, the
animation process is heavily reduced as well. If you’ve seen films such
as The Lord of the Rings, Polar Express, Pirates
of the Caribbean, or even King Kong then you’ve seen
the results of motion capture. However, those projects had massive teams
of people cleaning up and repairing motion capture data – not a viable
solution for smaller studios or producers looking to save money. Enter
PhaseSpace (www.phasespace.com),
whose motion capture solution requires little cleanup work, thus further
accelerating the development cycles of filmmakers.
Daniel Morrison, Remnant Studios' Creative Director, has begun texturing
the faces of the film's actors using projection-mapping techniques in
Maxon's Cinema 4D (C4D); while Technical Director, Jacob Picart,
begins applying motion capture data to rigged characters in Autodesk's
MotionBuilder. Once the animation is finessed with Natural Motion's
Endorphin, Jacob will hand off the data to Daniel, allowing him to
incorporate the animation to the textured characters in C4D. Once
characters are textured and animated, the elements will be placed in
their environments (sets) and Daniel will have complete control of where
to place the camera (known as layout or blocking). The final steps will
be sending the scene files off to the render farm and compositing
shortly afterwards. Once the final sequences are compiled the project
goes off to sound design and music, which is a topic in-and-of-itself.
Via the Vendor Showcase Project, Remnant Studios is proving that by
meshing all the necessary technologies together you can decrease
production costs while increasing quality, and produce a superior product
is less time. |
