A Trend Toward Organic Realism

This section describes the trend in films, TV, and games to push digital technology toward creating more realistic 3D characters. You also learn what is involved in working as a character modeler and setup artist for a large film company through two interviews with industry professionals.

From Jurassic Park to The Lord of the Rings

It is a good time to be working in the digital 3D character animation field. Even though the economy has declined in recent years, entertainment products such as films and games are more popular than ever. It is easy to see that the most successful films in the past few years contain large amounts of digital 3D imagery. Books that never could have been realized successfully in film before, such as Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, are now being done to box-office and critical acclaim. Others include Shrek, Monsters Inc., Harry Potter, the Star Wars prequels, The Matrix, Gladiator, Moulin Rouge, and the list goes on. Although some of these films fall into the realm of surrealistic 3D cartoons, many integrate digital 3D imagery with live action in ways that are very subtle. Many of these films contain digitally created extras, stunt doubles, and digital location sets seamlessly integrated with live-action footage. A few even contain digital actors in main roles playing next to live actors. The success of these films is pushing the industry toward using digital technology more and more to realize a filmmaker's vision, regardless of whether it is realistic.

Films are increasingly going digital for two main reasons. The first is that, in many cases, it is cheaper to create a virtual set in the computer than to build and shoot on a live set. Filming extensively at famous locations, such as Times Square in New York City, can be extremely expensive for a filmmaker. Such a shoot can require paying the city, state, owners of private property, union operators, actors, extras, and rental agencies. It also is becoming cheaper to create computer-generated "settings" for large-scale fantasy or period films than it is to make them as full-scale live sets. Populating these virtual sets with digital actors is just the next step in the process. It is becoming standard practice to add digital extras for large crowd scenes and use digital doubles for dangerous stunts. Going beyond this to using digital actors in main roles is already beginning to happen. Companies are even trying to capitalize on proven personalities by buying the rights for using the images of popular dead actors. It won't be long before digital versions of Marylyn Monroe, John Wayne, and Bruce Lee will be seen acting on the big screen again. At first, a digital 3D face of the famous personality will be placed on the bodies of live acting doubles. This technology was first developed to make talking animals in movies such as Babe in the 1990s. Since then, it has been thoroughly tested for replacing human faces with realistic digital faces by companies such as Disney, as demonstrated at SIGGRAPH Electronic Theatre in 2002.

The second reason why films are increasingly going digital is the control it gives to filmmakers. Shooting a live performance can lead to problems in the film and acting process that require reshooting of the scene. If the lighting wasn't quite right, or an actor flubbed part of an otherwise perfectly good scene, in many cases the scene must be redone. If, however, you are capturing the performance digitally, and your set is also digitally created, you can fix all those problems in postproduction. The director has the power to alter the performance for whatever effect is needed if the performance is digitized into the computer and then placed onto a digital 3D character. Notice that this process doesn't remove live actors as the source of the performance. Actors don't have to worry about their jobs; it will be a long time before a computer can generate the subtleties that a live actor can produce. The delivery of the performance, however, will increasingly be wrapped in a realistic digital skin.

Some definite milestones mark this road to digital actors populating films. Industrial Light + Magic (ILM) began introducing computer-generated character effects in films such as the Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, in the early 1990s. However, the first major use of digital 3D creatures was in 1993, when Steven Spielberg decided to have ILM animate digital 3D dinosaurs instead of strictly using puppets and animatronics for Jurassic Park. In the following years, some limited attempts were made at organic human characters. Pixar's Toy Story incorporated brief moments of very stylized humans. Digital Domain populated the sinking Titanic with digital extras. The next stage was to create a more anatomically realistic character that would replace main actors for whole scenes. A big step in this direction occurred with the making of The Mummy. Due to the necessity of seeing inside parts of the decaying creature, ILM was forced to create a digital version that had working muscles and bones inside. This not only looked good, but it also produced a much more realistic animation because it closely mimicked how a real body works. Because this technique worked so well in The Mummy, ILM used the similar techniques to remake the Jurassic Park dinosaurs to be more realistic in Jurassic Park 3. Sony Pictures Imageworks extended this approach when they created a digital version of Kevin Bacon for Hollow Man. In this case, they not only created all the working muscles and bones inside the character, they also created organs, so that everything worked correctly when the character's skin faded away.

In both The Mummy and Hollow Man, however, the digital actors were used only as brief stand-ins for the live actors, whenever a special effect was required. Only recently have completely digital characters been used for realistic acting roles in feature films. In 2001, although not entirely successful, Square pushed the technology further by creating close to realistic digital 3D characters in the Final Fantasy film. Since then, more successful digital characters have been seen in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The second Star Wars prequel introduced a fully digital Yoda, which actually had to be scaled back to make it fit with earlier versions of Yoda that had quirks due to the rubber material from which the puppet was made. The second Harry Potter film introduced a digital companion for Harry in the form of Dobby. As impressive as Yoda and Dobby were, however, neither achieved the dramatic intensity of Gollum in the second installment of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings. For the first time onscreen, people could see the incredible possibility of digital 3D characters. The scene when Gollum fights with himself over his relationship with Frodo was the most talked about scene in the movie, and helped win the Academy Award for visual effects. With the success of these digital characters, many other even more impressive ones will surely follow.

One other important trend is the reduction of the price of professional 3D animation software. The same software used to create many of the impressive digital characters in movies and games is now available to anyone at a much more accessible price. In the past, only large companies could afford a powerful 3D program such as Maya. However, the dropping of the cost of programs such as Maya in the past few years has made it possible for the average consumer to use professional-level 3D character tools. This enables the individual artist to produce 3D animations that are just as sophisticated as those seen in the biggest blockbuster film. When you add the ability to instantly and cheaply broadcast your animations to the entire world through the Internet, the possibilities are mind-boggling. Never before in history have individual artists been able to broadcast their work to the entire world in about an hour. As this trend continues to develop, opportunities for unknowns to become sources of entertainment content will increase. Recently, many character animations created by individuals and small companies have become extremely popular. Some of these include South Park, the Power Puff Girls, and Jimmy Neutron. Many 3D artists lose sight of the benefits of creating original characters, and instead only focus on creating characters for their demo reel that they can use to get a job at a large production facility. Keep in mind that Maya is an artist's tool, and if you create an interesting character that becomes hugely popular due to the Internet, you own all the rights to it. If your characters then get picked up in a major network series, or are made into a blockbuster movie, you will reap the benefits. Such benefits can include the complete artistic and financial freedom to create more original content.

Sculpting Characters for a Living

The job of a character modeler consists of creating the skin, clothes, and, sometimes, props of a 3D character. People who are good at character modeling are usually good at sculpting with traditional materials such as clay. To successfully model a character, they require the talent to visualize 2D designs in 3D, and are able to simplify complex objects into their basic shapes. For creating realistic characters, a modeler also must have an excellent understanding of anatomy, to create skin that deforms correctly at all the joints.

Maricela Perdomo is a professional character modeler at the renowned Tippett Studios in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has created many character models for films, including ones for Evolution, Blade 2, The One, Men in Black 2, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Matrix 3, and Stepford Wives. The following interview describes what is involved in working as a character modeler at a large film-effects studio:

Q: What does the job of a character modeler consist of at Tippett Studios?

A: A character modeler at Tippett is responsible for building models that will work effectively throughout our pipeline. Generally, we begin modeling either from scratch, from a scan, or one from our own library. It all depends on the type of reference we have available. When I start building an actor, I try to gather as many photographs as possible and I constantly compare them to my working surface. I cross-reference every angle of the actor's face and body so that there's no doubt that he/she looks as realistic as possible. People have little details in their face that make their features unique. It is important to pick out those subtleties and convey them in your 3D model. Scanned models come with good detail and provide you with a template that has the right proportion and height and volume of the person, but they don't always capture the tiny details around the nostrils or the way the eyelids fold. It's the modeler's job to fill in the blanks and still maintain the integrity of the model. We use NURBS, polygons, and subdivision surfaces for our models. Our models are required to be built as neatly and as cleanly as possible, but are not unnecessarily dense.

Q: What skills and knowledge did you need to develop to successfully perform your job at Tippett?

A: One of the most important skills that I have developed, which has served me at Tippett and other places, is to be flexible and open to change. Every employer so far has asked for me to use and learn different kinds of software, or has different procedures for how models need to be built and shared with others. I also need to have good visual and verbal communication skills so that I can translate into 3D everything the CG supervisor or art director asks me to do. I have to be able to build anything that is asked of me, no matter how difficult it may seem at first. When you have experience, nothing seems impossible, and you feel like there's nothing you can't build.

Q: Do you have any advice for people who want to get a job as a character modeler?

A: I've always said this, and will never stop saying it: "Never give up." If you can't get in the first, second, or tenth time to the studio of your dreams, don't stop trying. But, every time you apply, your work has to be recent, better than before, and it should show that you have kept up with the latest technology. Aspects of your work must match the quality that a studio expects for a production. At Tippett, the new employees that get in through these doors are the ones who never stopped trying; worked very hard to get here; have talent, great skills, and a great demo reel. They really wanted to be here. Once you are in, it's wonderful. You work even harder, and get to work with some very smart and talented people. You have the opportunity to create things you never dreamt of, and some that you did have dreams about. It's challenging, rewarding work of which you can be proud.

Rigging Characters for a Living

The job of a character setup artist consists of creating the controls for animating the character's skin and clothes, called a character rig. The talent required to do this successfully is a logical mind that likes to come up with solutions to technical problems. When a character setup artist creates a rig, they are creating hierarchies of skeletons and objects that must all work together to make the task of animating the character easier. In addition, riggers must have a strong understanding of anatomy so that they can emulate the way real bones, muscles, and skin work in a digital 3D character. Finally, a character setup artist must also have a good understanding of MEL scripting to create custom tools and interfaces in Maya.

Tim Naylor is a character setup artist, called a creature TD, at world-famous Industrial Light + Magic in the San Francisco Bay Area. He worked on characters for Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, The Hulk, and Pirates of the Caribbean. The following interview describes what is involved in working as a character setup artist at the largest film-effects studio in the world:

Q: What are the job responsibilities of a creature developer at ILM?

A: What we're responsible for more than anything else is servicing the animators. So our job is getting the characters properly rigged with the correct kind of animation control systems for the characters, and then delivering that to the animators. Lately, the creature development group at ILM has been expanded from just putting a skeleton into the character and creating animation controls to where you also have to prepare the character for rigid body dynamics, as well as cloth and hair simulations. So, really, the skill sets have been expanded.

Q: What kinds of rigs do you create?

A: We try to keep the rigs for our characters as standardized as possible, and then customize them specifically for each character if the need arises. For the Star Wars movies, there are so many aliens with different kinds of scales that we did a lot of specialized rigs, and then there are all kinds of rigging done for their props. There are really two levels of interaction, one being the props associated with the character, such as Yoda and his cane, and then enabling the animators to easily interact with other objects in the scene. The animators don't have to really go deep into the constraining world in Maya, or the hypergraph, because we provide support in that way. Animation support tools, such as importing and exporting animation in the form of scripts, are delivered and created by the creature development group. It's great that it is a very broad and demanding field as far as the knowledge and skill sets required.

Q: Do you use strictly proprietary software?

A: We use a combination, so that animation may be done with off-the-shelf software, but our simulations are pretty much done with proprietary software. We have our own rigid body and cloth software. However, we do write our own plug-ins and tools within commercial animation packages.

Q: What skills should someone develop who wants to get a job as a setup artist at a company such as ILM?

A: At this point in time, scripting is absolutely critical. I know that scares a lot of students, and it even scared me, but once you determine that you are going to learn it, you can. If you look at the future, where this is all heading, it's becoming more and more script driven, because you really need to be able to manipulate the software. These commercial packages are now open, so we can use something like MEL to make the software do what we need it to do. That's the power we need. With MEL, there are built-in mathematical functions, so you can dig into the software and manipulate it with math, which is a growing need. Manipulating MEL may get you 80 percent of the way to your goal, but you may have to use some crazy math to conjure up the last 20 percent and get the software to do what you want it to do.

Q: Do you also set up the muscle systems for the character, and how much anatomy knowledge must you have?

A: Not only do we set up the muscles, but after a simulation is run, we also really go through and look at the anatomy. We check to see if the muscles are moving correctly, and will if necessary go in by hand and make sure the shape of the muscles is anatomically correct. Sometimes we even do a little bit of modeling in our department as well. We are smack-dab in the middle of the production process, so we get the character and user interfaces rolling and off to the animators, and then we will get the characters back again later to perform simulations, and then we hand it off to the technical directors for lighting.

Q: Do you have any other closing advice for someone who wants to become a professional creature developer?

A: Learning the software is one thing, but understanding how things are working under the hood, and being able to manipulate that, is very important. This means not only having scripting knowledge, but understanding why numbers in the channels come up the way they do when you constrain and parent objects. This requires understanding coordinate systems, and being able to problem solve. Understanding why the numbers are changing when you are working with things such as orient constraints enables you to troubleshoot problems and is the real benefit of knowing what's under the hood of the software. There will be situations when just doing a constraint won't work, and you may have to rearrange parts of the hierarchy, and then do the constraint.

We are looking for people who are on top of the current state of the industry, and who are trying to solve the same problems that we are working on. They should try to show on their reel that they not only know how to rig, but that they also are trying to innovate and solve problems. You can't have a character move without secondary muscle movement and jiggle, which is what we do all day long. If they just show a skeleton walking around, that's not going to be enough. They should show that they are really concerned with the details of character movement, and how the flesh is moving. If they can do that even without proprietary simulation tools, it shows innovation.