CG animator Austin Eddy’s tips tips for matching stop-frame animation
Although boxlw is a feature film made with stop-frame animation, not all animators in Laika work with small puppets and 3D printed face replacement. In Laika, a crew of CG animators performed background boxTroll and human characters that appear throughout the film. Animator Austin Edi is one of those animators. Prior to Laika, Eddie was recently in Wet Digital, where he gave to animated characters for the characters. Tintin And for live action films planet of the Apes, Hobbit, AvatarAnd other characteristics.
A background in live-action film production is important for CG animators working on stop-frame films.
“We treated Boxstrol Like a live-action film, ”says Eddie. “In live-action, they shoot actors in front of a greenscreen and your CG characters and organisms interact with them. On the boxlw, we had a stop-motion animated characters shot against Greenscreen instead of actors. When we start a shot, we get plates with stop-motion characters and a match-cold camera in the scene. We can see stop-motion characters, so we can make sure that our characters are in the same world and can move the same. Stop-frame animation is such a hard and time-consuming art form, it would be almost impossible for those animators that they do many characters in these scenes. The main characters are stop motion, but most background characters and a lot of background CG. We touched every scene of the film a lot. ,
Motion-Capture CG can give an inimators a good initial point.
“Sometimes it is easiest to conscious by hand, but in the shots where we had 30 characters or more, it would have a long work to make it,” Eddi says. “So, we had a lot of motion capture shots for human characters, at the end with a few hundred characters on the screen for crowd scenes, and also with some dance scenes. They hired professional dancers and a choreographer. We will bring the data to the Maya and we will take the data, it will be taken, time, time, pard-down movement, the basis of hand and feet It was that what we wanted to take from the motion capture so that it could feel like a stop motion.
The dancers are difficult to look like puppets.
“Those people who were translated to the ballroom were trained dancers, so they took their bodies and went away,” says Edi. “But the stop-motion characters were the people of the aristocratic class dancing at a party, so we had to accommodate the pose of dancers to live in that world. In addition, the ratio of the aristocratic class was different – the puppets are very high. And the costumes were different. The dancers wore a black spandex suit with dots. In the film, women wear hop dress. Therefore, the way female dancers interacted with male dancers did not end. The CG Akshar is next to the stop-motion characters in the film, so we had to ensure that our animated characters do not stand out, which was difficult. Stop motion is very different from motion capture, sometimes I thought I can only do the character’s kisframe and it would be better in the world. We had to walk on a good line. ,
However, it is fun to animate of the boxTroll.
,Boxstrol Was super fun to work, ”says Eddie. “One of my first shots stood around CG Boxstrol eggs (main character), which had pops in their boxes. The lids are finished and flare down. It is very good to do that flash -ridiculous animation. Sometimes when I was working on creatures or characters that are big and heavy for live-action films, it became laborious. But, boxlines are fun, energetic letters with a cute a bit walking. We had some large sequences with CG boxlines and for me it was the best part of the show. Their design is fun. ,
Animators can also create CG characters.
“Models and rigors install a system that we can use to make a large number of individual boxlines,” Eddie says. “We can have different weapons, heads, feet, boxes and labels for boxes. I think we probably had 12 or more variations we used the most, but we could make hundreds. The ratio changed, but they were all similar, standardized rigs. Before we load a visual, we decided which boxes to use, but we can switch them to the fly. The way they rigged, we mostly use the box as their body, but in some shots, you see their body. ,
It is difficult to match CG’s face for animated puppets with 3D printed parts.
“Facial animation in CG is easy – you can get very fast results and it can be very fine and smooth,” Eddie says. “But stop motion facial animation is made of kit with thousands of shapes. The faces are divided into two with brow parts and parts of the mouth. Stop motion animators swap each face on every frame. It gives the characters a beautiful hand touched look. But, in CG animation, the touch look with that hand is not out of the box, so it is difficult to get CG characters to live in the same world. Our facial rigs are not blend-shape operated. We have some corrective sizes, but we mostly use distortions and controls. As soon as we go, we make our shapes. ,
Of one or two? This is not important.
“I like to work on one,” Eddie says. “This is the way to do animation throughout my career. But, if you look at the speed onscreen and it looks right, I have no concern about whether it is on someone or two. It is more important to feel this. ,
Extension is in decrease.
“Puppets have metal skeletons that are manufactured in them, which have the same type of joints that we have in a CG rig, so they are the same,” Eddie says. “They are both 3D, both are jointly operated, and you pose them. The difference is that we have IK and accessories like this in CG, so they are not at all. The stop motion life gives what the extra bit is not 100% smooth and perfect. I spend more than half of my time in the graph editor area because I understand the decrease. So that the arcates gives it an additional something that makes it realistic.
Even background boxlines may have personal personality.
“We tried to ensure that all CG boxes had little life,” Eddie says. “They were not just random people; Each has a story. We gave surname to all of them. There a directors gave the nickname of photobomb as he always ended in shots. And, every main characters like fish and shoes have a little paper label on its box, so we also labeled on our CG boxTroll. The label was directed to art and then shifted to CG, so we could switch them around. Some people are shouting for people on the show – Brad Chif, Animation Director: Bradley’s bounced balls. ,
Is real and then real.
I come from a visual impact background, so I use my animation to live in very real, very heavy, real world and interact with Live Action World. Stop motion is a caricated, style, exaggerated real world, so it was an infection for me. Of course the principals of animation are all similar. But, when you come in fine details, it is very different from understanding how a boxTrol interacts with the real world is very different from understanding how a chimpanzee moves. It was great to be in that different perspective. This was a fun experience for me. ,
