Soulcage Department Christmas Rabbit 2008

[Elm]

Hi Folks!

 

After some time off, and some projects that we've done with other software packages, we finally did a project with A:M again. It's the return of the christmas rabbit!

Here's a quicktime link: Christmas Rabbit 640 x 480 (ca.18 MB)

 

A:M was used for all the characters, as well as the table, chairs, candles and the advent wreath.

 

 

Greetings,

Elm and the whole Department!

 

P.S.: We just updated our website. Have a look in "Our Work" to watch our recent projects:

http://www.soulcage-department.de

[agep]

This looks absolutely jaw dropping! Very nice style and mood. Thanks for the inspiring work!

[Bendytoons]

Really beautiful work.

[Tralfaz]

Brilliant! Great characters and a wonderful setting.

 

Al

[largento]

Wow! Now I'm feeling really inadequate! :-)

 

Awesome!

[NancyGormezano]

Absoulutely gorgeous, inspiring imagery, as well as a fun, appealing, expert style of animating !

 

(WOW is right)

[Gerry]

Nice!

[serg2]

as always - fantastic job!

[MasterFunk]

Wow. How did you animate the scroll unrolling?

[KenH]

Great work as usual guys. May you keep inspiring us in the future.

[TheSpleen]

wonderful work!

[heyvern]

Dang foreigners stealing all our jobs! That's the problem with the world today. All them foreign people talkin' funny. You want to steal our animation jobs? Learn English dangit. ;)

 

Great work as usual guys. I love that rabbit. Reminds me of the movie "Harvey"... but with out the the drunk crazy guy... unless... Santa was drinking some nog.

 

-vern

[Elm]

Wow. How did you animate the scroll unrolling?

 

It's been done with a muscle pose. It unfolds just as it would in real life (the pose contained keyframes every tenth percent).

 

Thanks for your compliments.

[robcat2075]

Wunderbar!

[John Bigboote]

Yeah, top notch! I like at the end where the Bunny looks at the list, then at the kid...CUTE!

[cronos]

nice work

[MJL]

Inspirational work! Great Website! Translation: Geiz ist geil= ?

[itsjustme]

Very cool! Thanks for the link!

[Elm]

Inspirational work! Great Website! Translation: Geiz ist geil= ?

 

 

Maybe "Save and rave" or "Greed is great" or "Thrifty is nifty" or "Smooch the scrooge"

 

 

Something like that.

 

Greetz,

Elm.

[thefreshestever]

awesome!!! really great stuff! but i´m wondering.... i never saw one of those spots on tv (ok, i barely watch tv, but you´ve made so many for saturn i guess i would have noticed at least one of them ...) !!??

 

grüsse aus mainz...

[jakerupert]

That`s just Saturn Austria...

[Paul Forwood]

Soulcage do it again! Excellent!

If I may just make one tiny little, probably unimportant, criticism...

In the closeup of Santa, when he does a double-take of the Christmas list, his body remains static and this takes some of the life out of this shot, in my opinion. Just a little reaction in the shoulders, or a slight turn of the upper body, would have added more emphasis to his shock and surprise I think. You could also have just cut to an extreme close-up of his face when he reacts. Everything else is 1st class, as always.

Very well done!

[mike meyer]

Soulcage do it again! Excellent!

If I may just make one tiny little, probably unimportant, criticism...

In the closeup of Santa, when he does a double-take of the Christmas list, his body remains static and this takes some of the life out of this shot, in my opinion. Just a little reaction in the shoulders, or a slight turn of the upper body, would have added more emphasis to his shock and surprise I think. You could also have just cut to an extreme close-up of his face when he reacts. Everything else is 1st class, as always.

Very well done!

 

 

Hello Paul,

 

first of all: thank you for your kind words!

 

you are absolutely right...

since we had a really tight production schedule we decided to render and compose the scenes the client was happy with while working on the others... the santa closeup was one of the first scenes the client loved and we got a go for it... that's it...

 

(hope my english is good enough for you to understand )

 

all the best,

michael

[jo b.]

i actually like it this way, cause it helps to focus on the important part, his face.

the extreme closeup is also a good idea, but i also think it's a question of style.

greetz.

[Rodney]

Finally got a chance to download and watch this.

 

Wonderful!!!

 

I am curious about those candles... they look like they were inspired by Anders tests posted here in the forum long... long... ago.

 

Needless to say you continue to impress.

Saturn is one very luck company to have you creating their advertisements.

 

Edit: I've watched this thing about 20 times so far.

Theres something new to see every time.

[Jeetman]

This validates 2 things that we already know: 1, A:M has the potential for incredible professional quality productions and 2, How inadequate you feel when you see an incredible professional quality production done hehe.

 

 

Elm and Michael, this is one of the best productions I've ever seen using A:M. It's literally awe inspiring, OUTSTANDING work!

 

George

[Elm]

...

 

I am curious about those candles... they look like they were inspired by Anders tests posted here in the forum long... long... ago.

 

Hey!

 

Yea, indeed it was inspired by those candles (think I remember that thread, too...).

 

Funny is that, if I remember right, that thread was about subsurface scattering, right?

Well, our candles had no sss at all, the only passes that were rendered out for the candles were these:

 

 

I made the candles look ssscattered in After effects by composing these passes pretty experimentally...

 

Greetz,

Elm.

[Rodney]

Shhh.... don't tell people they can composite images... who knows what that would lead to.

 

Very nice Elm.

Thanks for sharing that effect!

 

 

I search for and found the topic I was thinking of here.

[jakerupert]

Hi Elm,

 

>I made the candles look ssscattered in After effects by composing these passes pretty experimentally...

 

to import into aftereffects?

 

Great work, hope you will be able to do some feature or tv-length work in that style once!

 

;>) Jake

[Elm]

...

I search for and found the topic I was thinking of here.

 

 

That's exactly the thread I had in mind!

Yeah, indeed - as I came up with the idea of an advent wreath on the table, I immediately was thinking of aaver's candle !

 

Greetz,

Elm.

[Elm]

...

to import into aftereffects?

 

 

 

No...

 

Every pass is an independent 'autarc' A:M project itself: For every pass we need, we create specific models (i.e.: "candle-white.mdl" or "candle-flat.mdl" etc...)

As well as specific choreographies (one with flat shaded models, one just for the ambience occlusion, etc...)

It's pretty much work to create and handle all these different pass-choreographies (...not always as easy as with those candles... ) , but it's worth it, and it's pretty safe, because you know what the result will look like.

The rendered images of each pass are simple tga-sequences with or without alpha channel.

 

Great work, hope you will be able to do some feature or tv-length work in that style once!

 

Well, I think that commercials have pretty cool timeframes. I think I would go nuts spending months and years telling just one story (which may even turn out whack in the end and I was blinded by work, not seeing it).

 

Greetz,

Elm.

[frosteternal]

The whole clip is very nicely done, in particular, the lush, soft bunny-fur. Any tips on working a character completely covering hair? How dense is the hair set? Any special grooming tricks?

 

Very, very sharp work.

[Elm]

The whole clip is very nicely done, in particular, the lush, soft bunny-fur. Any tips on working a character completely covering hair? How dense is the hair set? Any special grooming tricks?

 

Very, very sharp work.

 

 

The only tip from my side would be to first focus on the desired look (without thinking technically). Then to think about "which / how many / how designed" passes you need to have, baring in mind your idea of compositing and post production possibilities and such (i.e. blurring individual passes differently, etc...).

Thanks,

 

Elm.

[heyvern]

Well, I think that commercials have pretty cool timeframes. I think I would go nuts spending months and years telling just one story (which may even turn out whack in the end and I was blinded by work, not seeing it).

 

Plus, due to the web and youtube the new generation of viewers want shorter content. Short attention spans are the rule of the day. In a year or two you could produce 1 long animation... or... 50 short ones. Going to reach a broader audience with 50.

 

-vern

[Elm]

Plus, due to the web and youtube the new generation of viewers want shorter content. Short attention spans are the rule of the day. In a year or two you could produce 1 long animation... or... 50 short ones. Going to reach a broader audience with 50.

 

 

So true.

But even without thinking about reaching a broader audience - to me, it's mostly about not loosing myself in a project that's too big

 

Greetz,

Elm.

[heyvern]

That must be why I never married. Do you want to spend years working on the same animation or do a whole bunch of different animations?

 

Didn't exactly work out exactly as planned... I haven't "done" a bunch of animations either.

 

 

-vern

[Elm]

[bighop]

Very nice!

 

I have a dumb question. When the characters were pushing against the door and each other, how do you prevent them from going right into the door or each other. Is that with a constraint? In other words, how did you make them solid so they can't pass through anything?

[heyvern]

bighop,

 

I don't know exactly how they do it at soul cage but in general I don't think there is an easy short cut like a constraint for this. You have to just... make sure nothing passes through... doing it "by hand" so to speak. Rough out the motion then move things so they don't penetrate. Probably some muscle poses, or tweaking bone positions. In a scene like that it is a "one off" kind of situation. You wouldn't have that kind of thing happening all the time.

 

I remember the commentary track for "Over the Hedge". The FX guys who handled hair were constantly having fits and trying to cut down on the number of "hugging" or touching scenes because of how incredibly difficult it was to animate the characters interacting with each other and all the hair. In that "old" 3D movie "Final Fantasy" there was one shot that took more time than anything else in the movie. they spent weeks on this one shot. It was the kissing scene. Two characters lock lips and embrace with a tracking camera move. A real tough shot. I remember hearing about how difficult that was due to parts of each character... uh... penetrating other parts.

 

If however there IS some cool trick for this type of character interaction I don't know about... I too would like to know.

 

-vern

[bighop]

Thanks Vern,

 

I feared that would be the answer, I was hopping for an easy one. Maybe one day.

[heyvern]

When dealing with things like Newton Physics it's actually a bit easier. I don't know if anyone has tried to apply that kind of thing to characters... i don't think the accuracy would be enough. You would have to have incredibly small collision radius amounts to give you the kind of "close up" detail needed. Plus it would be a pain doing simulations etc... sometimes doing it "the hard way" is the best way.

 

-vern

[Paul Forwood]

how do you prevent them from going right into the door or each other.

 

When I first viewed this short I was going to remark on the enormous amount of penetration going on, but as it is all hair, and I understand the complexities of avoiding it, I said nothing. If you step through the frames though you will find plenty of examples of hair penetrating meshes. The brain seems to overlook/forgive these abnormalities when hair is in transition.

 

That sequence, where Santa and the Rabbit are struggling to be first through the door is terrific!

[Rodney]

The brain seems to overlook/forgive these abnormalities when hair is in transition.

 

Paul,

I think this is a very true statement.

 

In watching this video many times I never once saw hair penetration. (Still haven't as of this date)

I'd guess this was firstly and foremostly because I wasn't looking for it.

I'd also guess the odds of the intended audiences noticing isn't likely.

 

In thinking back... the characters eyes/faces held most of my attention.

I was completely absorbed in the storytelling of it.

 

My critique... it was over too quick.

I suppose thats the nature of the beast in commercial advertisement.

[Elm]

Hey guys!

You're all right.

 

Door Sequence:

Rough animation, then muscle poses to clean out penetrations. We didn't really care about the hair penetrating something or such. As you pointed out: Everything goes quick and the eye doesn't notice that quick.

 

I always bare in mind to not loose myself in something that's not too important and keep my eye on the story and the things that the eye usually catches.

 

And: Yes, commercials are always over too quick.

 

Greetz,

Elm.

[KenH]

Oh no. I wouldn't worry about the hair. It's short enough to think it's being pushed aside. Imagine having collision detection on hair!!! Loooong render times. While stepping through though I did see Santas hands penetrating his hips before he puts them on his hips. But it's fast enough not to notice at normal speed.

[Elm]

Oh no. I wouldn't worry about the hair. It's short enough to think it's being pushed aside. Imagine having collision detection on hair!!! Loooong render times. While stepping through though I did see Santas hands penetrating his hips before he puts them on his hips. But it's fast enough not to notice at normal speed.

 

 

Exactly.

[Rodney]

(using this as an excuse to bump this topic up again)

 

In thinking about the whole eye/face thing I grabbed Richard William's 'The Animator's Survival Kit' and looked through it. I recall it has a lot to say on the subject. One quote in particular I thought was really worth noting as it can apply to every character animation project.

 

Sound advice came from the Disney Studio early on:

If you're short of time, spend it on the eyes. The eyes are what people watch.

 

How very true.

 

Have I told you how much I highly recommend this book?

If you are an animator (and you are!) you really need it as a reference.

Every time I pick it up I learn something new.

[animas3D]

This work is great. The use of the hair is excellent.

 

Did you do the depth of field in the beginning within Animation Master or in the compositor?

 

Also, what is your preferred technique of grooming the hair? Do you move each of the hair splines by hand or use the brush tool?

 

Thanks for the great work.

[jo b.]

This work is great. The use of the hair is excellent.

 

Did you do the depth of field in the beginning within Animation Master or in the compositor?

 

Also, what is your preferred technique of grooming the hair? Do you move each of the hair splines by hand or use the brush tool?

 

Thanks for the great work.

 

thanks,

 

the DOF was done in the post using fog to generate the DOF pass.

the hair was groomed with both techiques. and there are several hair materials used. short hair for the fingers, longer hair for the body, thicker hair for the beard, another one for the eybrows... etc. every hair material was tweaked different.

[Gerry]

After reading some of the above comments I went and watched it again, and stepped through frame by frame for some of it. I think all these points about penetration are really nonissues when it comes to animation, in fact you can cheat an awful lot in animation in general since the eye perceives it totally differently than still images. Most of the penetration in the coming-through-the-door scene, even viewed slowly, reads like the fur just being crushed. And even stepping through, most of it reads just fine. It really is a terrific piece of work!