“Equilibrio” by New York University
Conference:
- SIGGRAPH 2007 More animation videos from SIGGRAPH 2007:


SIGGRAPH Video Review:
Track:
- 22
Title:
- Equilibrio
Director(s):
Company / Institution / Agency:
- New York University
Description:
A male character confined in a dark gym exer-cises to develop his upper-body muscles, and as he grows to enormous proportions from his waist up, his body stability changes.
The challenge in this New York University the-sis project for the Master of Science in Digital Imaging and Design Program was to manipu-late live-action footage using the software learned in the program to achieve the desired visual effect.
An imaginative solution was required to pro-duce a photorealistic 3D virtual torso without using a virtual muscle and bone system. Eighty-two polygonal sculptures were created in ZBrush for use with Michael B. Comet’s PoseDeformer plug-in for Maya. A rigged torso with the PSD deformations was rotoscoped to match the actor’s movement on Maya Live cameras. Then muscle growth was animated with blend shapes and influenced by a Maya hair-driven simulation to create a jiggling effect. ZBrush was also crucial in creating highly detailed displacement and texture maps to be used with Mental Ray’s subsurface scat-tering shaders in Maya for a convincing skin look.
Hardware:
AMD Athlon 64X2 Dual Core Processor 4800+, 2.41GHz, 2.0 GB RAM
Software:
Autodesk Maya unlimited 7.0 , Michael B. Comet’s Pose Deformer, Pixologic ZBrush 2.0, Adobe Premiere 2, Adobe Photoshop 7.0, Adobe Illustrator CS2, Adobe After Effects 7.0
Additional Contributors:
Director: Tomas Salles
Idea: Rodrigo Carvalho, Tomas Salles
Producers: Natasha Novis, Tomas Salles
Co-Producer: Bobby Yan
Production Designer: Natasha Novis
Cinematography: Chris Freilich
Camera Assistant: Amy Bostwick
Gaffer: Carl Schroder
Key Grip: Jean Chen
Editor: Tomas Salles
Digital FX: Tomas Salles
Soundtrack: João Brasil
Production Assistants: John Alberico, Young Lee
Driver: Jose
Thanks to: All the CADA/NYU teachers who helped me and The Mill New York for the render support.
Special thanks to: My wife Natasha (Re), Momy and Eduardo, Papi, Sardin, Juli,
“G. da Gavea,” my dog Leão, and everybody at Fitness Point Gym, Queens.