“Hair today, Cloth tomorrow: Automating Character Fx on Peter Rabbit” by Green, Fransen, Gray and Kranz
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Entry Number: 11
Title:
- Hair today, Cloth tomorrow: Automating Character Fx on Peter Rabbit
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Abstract:
In “Peter Rabbit” (2018) the characters in the film needed to evolve from their 2D watercolour illustrated past into modern photo-real and engaging performances of a live-action world. The direction of the film necessitated high quality dynamic fur, cloth and feathers in a wide variety of shots, covering nuanced performances to frantic action sequences in a number of environmental conditions. Developing a better mechanism for creating character FX on such a diverse range of characters in over 1,100 shots was a major and necessary challenge.
To achieve the scope and scale of the work, we created a number of workflows using complex hair and cloth tools embedded in multiprocess FX rigs for not only the artists, but also for automatic processes in each and every animation review. We termed this “AnimCFX” and the goal was to leverage our large farm processing capability to produce a significant portion of the work and enable more focused iteration time on bespoke hero shots with our small character FX team.
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Acknowledgements:
Thanks to FX TDs Jon Cox and Jaideep Khadilkar for building the AnimCFX pipeline, Simon Bull and Oliver Dunn for the perfor mance pipeline management; The Character FX crew for building and maintaining AnimCFX rigs; Feargal Stewart’s early supervision; and the animation team for their patience in the process.
