“Equilibrio” by New York University

  • ©Tomas Salles

Conference:


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.