TD @ Dreamworks Unit, Technicolor India.

Hurray! A New job with the “Dream Team” 🙂

So after three good years at Prana, I moved to Dreamworks Animation that recently opened its new unit in Bangalore as an FX TD. Many of my friends and ex-colleagues were surprised about my switch from Character TD to an FX TD because I was never ever involved in FX work as long as anyone could remember. But things work little differently at DW from what one would normally think an FX TD would do. As an FX TD I “support” the FX dept and don’t really do shot work. So there is no immediate requirement to know about particles, fluids etc. although knowing it certainly helps solve issues related to those elements quickly. However the general idea of a Dept TD in Dreamworks is a person who has the ability to investigate issues and find the solutions using his general aptitude and logical reasoning. Scripting skills do come in handy in this process and the more experience one has the better.

As far as I’m concerned, it is a huge challenge and there will be many new things to learn and a totally new domain to explore. Also bring a TD gives maximum exposure to the Dreamworks pipeline that has evolved over years and known to be one of the best in the industry. On the flip side, it would make me drift away from my profile as a Character TD but I believe it is the best opportunity for me to get into the pipeline design aspect of the production and aspire to bring both experiences together and build a stronger skillset.

Delhi-6

When Jumanji released in 1995, I was doing my pre-university and like others I was eager to start thinking seriously about what I’ll do with the rest of my life. With that in mind I attended a “career councelling fair” where a certain multimedia institute showed a small segment of Jumanji to attract students to join their course which would eventually lead them to work in Jumanji-2 perhaps :). Though I had other plans for my career at that time, I was very impressed to know that all those animals were computer generated.

Fast forward to 2008 and I’m actually involved in creating a photorealistic CG monkey for a scene in the Bollywood movie Delhi-6. Although it was for just one scene of the movie, it gave a glimpse of what it takes to create a photorealisic CG character work. My respect to those who worked on movies like Jurassic park, King kong, Chronicles of Narnia increased manyfold.

Being one of the members of the character development team my role was to rig the monkey for realistic animation and deformation. To begin with, we had fun collecting monkey reference at the sets of Delhi-6 in Mudh Island where a monkey trainer was hired to bring his monkey. We saw bollywood biggies like Abhishek Bachan and Omprakash Mehra with their team planning and executing the scenes. After the monkey trainer arrived with his monkey, we got to work shooting pictures and videos of the monkey as it did different actions as instructed by its trainer. We also took body measurements of the monkey to get the proportions right for modeling.

One of the many challenges we faced while developing the CG monkey was to get the body volume vs fur volume right. It is tricky because the fur density varies across the body making it hard to imagine the shape and volume of the body mesh that would make the monkey look good after the fur is put on it. So we made another mesh to represent fur volume and tweaked both the inner body mesh and the fur volume mesh relative to one another untill it looked right. The fur volume mesh would not only provide a good reference for fur generation but also help animators get a visual feedback during animation in terms of the degree of fur penetration that would happen at different poses.

Once the body proportions/volume and fur volume looked good, we began planning for the rig. Watching closely at the some of the action we had captured, we identified the range of motion and some of the key poses that the monkey normally gets into and also some of the limitations – a monkey cannot stand straight comfortably without support because of the structure of the pelvic bone, and it cannot stretch its hands sideways fully because its clavicle is more aligned front-to-back rather than sideways like humans. After these points were discussed with animators the rig requirements were laid out and we finally started rigging it. Two very helpful resources for body setup were Animator friendly quadruped rigging by Zavier Solsona and Animator friendly rigging by Jason Schliefer. We dealt with most of the deformation issues using corrective shapes – before and after animation and a few even at the rendering stage to control the fur that reacts to the underlying mesh deformation.

All in all it was a very iterative process involving all departments working very closely with one another to make a single shot of a photorealistic creature – where it enters the frame, snarls at the camera and moves away – look “real”. The other monkeys in the shot were just copies of the same monkey.

So once again, I would like to thank and congratulate the team at Prana for all their efforts that went into this project.