Monday 03 Jul 2006
Director Ben Hibon turned to Axis Animation for help in bringing his animation for MTV to life in 3D. The result is the stunning short film Codehunters.
I wanted to make something with a different style and feel: a warm, textured, original animated universe,” says director Ben Hibon of his latest creation, an actionpacked animated short film entitled Codehunters.
First shown as a prologue to the MTV Asia Music Awards in Bangkok in May, Codehunters tells the story of Lhek, a crumbling city in the near future ruled by the merciless tyrant Khann. Four iconic hero characters, Shen, Lawan, Zom and Nhi, join forces to battle corrupt gangs, dirty cops, and rampaging monsters to overthrow the evil Khann, and along the way encounter the mysterious figure Krai.
Written, storyboarded, and directed by Hibon and produced by Bart Yates at Blinkink Productions, Codehunters was created in 3D by Glasgow animation studio Axis Animation.
“CG was always the preferred route for Codehunters, for both artistic and technical reasons,” explains Hibon. “But I wanted to make the CG feel textured and warm, like an inked illustration on paper. I also wanted to approach the animation style differently, by applying 2D techniques to CG.
“Instead of motion capture or photo-realism, I wanted to work with stylized motions, key frames, and parallaxes. Axis understood and delivered that brilliantly. You can stop the film at any frame, and get a cool illustration... that’s a great result!”
Originally conceived as a series for MTV, the brief for Codehunters changed to become a branding package for the MTV Asia Awards.
“What was interesting for me was the challenge of making an animation that would work as one film, but also broken into nine scenes to be used throughout the show... something that would set the tone, pace and style for the bigger story; where the film ends, the story begins,” says Hibon.
He kick-started the project with the main character concepts and a large drawing of the city. Once approved by MTV, scriptwriting and storyboarding happened simultaneously, and 3D production begun.
“Production time was tight, so we had to be creative throughout the whole process with creation of assets, techniques, and solutions,” says Hibon. “Although the vision of defined from the start, the process of making it was organic, which made it fun and exciting for everyone involved.”
The biggest challenge of the project was translating the 2D characters into 3D, while retaining the essence of Hibon’s hand-drawn illustrative style.
“We looked at other cel-shaded 3D but everyone agreed early on that we wanted to push things a lot further and get something that brought Ben’s concepts to life,” says Stuart Aitken, technical director at Axis Animation.
“That’s one of the reasons the piece is so unique and coherent stylistically – we put a lot into it but it was always to serve Ben’s vision.”
Hibon worked closely with the modellers and animators at Axis, spending hours looking at how the 2D characters and animatic translated into 3D. Character modelling was done in NewTek LightWave and Luxology Modo, making extensive use of both packages’ subdivision surface tools.
Character modeller Serge Caires then meticulously hand painted B&W line art textures complete with ink strokes to achieve the desired illustrative look. With no dialogue in the film, keeping the animation expressive was vital, and so for layout and character animation the team switched to Maya.
“While LightWave is probably the best package to use when you need great looking stuff fast, we realized a long time ago that animation was not one of its strong points, so we switched to Maya for animation and rigging,” says Aitken.
Expressive animation
To avoid the stiff movement of 3D models, lead rigging TD Jakub Krompolc built complex rigs that allowed the animators to fine tune the curvature of each character’s limbs. This helped accentuate poses and add expression to the body language.
Secondary animation was a further challenge. Having toyed with using physical-based simulations, Krompolc fell back on simpler techniques that offered control over hair and cloth, particularly Shen’s coat.
“In the end it was the animators who really nailed this and a lot of the secondary animation is hand animated,” says Aitken.
“It’s a bit like lipsync – if you’ve a good rig and a good animator it doesn’t take as long as people think it does, and it’s often much quicker doing it that way than wrestling with dynamics, which are always a pig to direct properly. The hand-animated style also fitted better with the feel of the rest of the piece.”
Axis created multiple render passes in LightWave, which were then assembled in Combustion to allow for fine tuning without the need to re-render. There were two looks for the film – interiors were dark and moody while the exterior shots had an almost bleached-out look.
A key light pass – stark and predominantly rim lit – was used for the interiors with much higher key frontal lighting for the exteriors. An ambient occlusion pass supplied almost all the fill light and gave a soft, illustrative feel.
The fill ratio was kept low in the comps for the interiors and fairly high for the exteriors, notes Aitken. A couple of toonshading techniques were employed to add silhouette and detail outlines, and these were rendered out separately.
“We altered the strength of these with a depth pass that allowed us to fade off the contrast with distance, which was vital to give the sense of depth and scale we needed,” explains Aitken.
Smoke screened
Each shot required several FX passes. These varied between obvious effects such as smoke and explosions to subtle ones such as fogging, mist, depth-cueing and volumetric lighting.
The latter was used extensively to soften up the look, add atmosphere and make everything feel integrated. It was important both in giving the interior shots a moody feel, and the exterior shots a sense of scale, says Aitken.
“The biggest technical challenge was the smoke effects, which had to hit just the right balance between soft and solid to sit properly with everything else – as well as fine-tuning each shot to get the right tonal balance without leaving anything looking muddy or unclear.
“We spent a great deal of effort on lighting composition and making sure the feel of each shot was right and that the characters were clearly accentuated while still sitting properly in their environments,” says Aitken.
To deal with the complexity of the scenes – some exterior shots had as many as 25 separate passes – the compositors split them into fore, middle and background elements. Codehunters took around seven months to complete.
“It’s the first time I had the chance to work on such a long production, and I really enjoyed the possibilities that a long-running project offers to the creative process,” says Hibon.
“It’s not so much a short burst of creative energy like sometimes a music video or a commercial can be, but more of a long burning vision of many collaborations.”
Aitken agrees: “Projects like this tend to bond your team together as everyone has to pitch in and really try to stretch themselves creatively and technically.”
Lynn Wright
Read our informed and inspiring features as soon as they're published -- click here follow @digital_arts on Twitter.
Question of the day!
Do you share your creations online?
% of Digital Arts readers agree with you
What do you create and how do you share it?
Follow the conversation at @TabletChat
Yes. I usually put them up on my #deviantart account for feedback on how to improve.RT @spialelo
Varies... from vector artwork to photo manips. I add them to my portfolio and/or my DA account & then provide links.RT @MrRyanDee
sometimes photography, it gets shared on the free stock photography sites, give back what you get, I use them so i put back.RT @edjonesy
Submit to:
Question of the day!
Neil Bennett
Editor
Do you share your creations online?