Multimedia
Newsletters
Blogs
Whitepapers
Events
DCP Directory
Mill Directory
Edit Calendar
Advertisers
Reader SurveyRobots XSI
Feb 1, 2005 12:00 PM, Michael Goldman
When New York-based production company UVPhactory (UVPH) took on all aspects of producing a recent 3:30 music video for hip-hop artist Pete Miser, called “Scent of a Robot,” the company's animation unit crafted a cartoony cast of CG robots.
Plug-ins created by members of the Softimage online user community helped UVPhactory create cartoon-style CG robots.
Jake Slutsky, UVPH senior designer/animator/compositor on the project, says the company took particular advantage of the newest version (4.0) of Softimage XSI and several XSI plug-in tools. UVPH first bulked up XSI's Toon Shader with custom shaders that permitted artists to give the robots softer, subtler shading to befit the cartoonish theme. According to Slutsky, contributions from the growing online community of XSI aficionados were central to the project's success. Most of them, and many others, he advises, can be located at the online Softimage community website, www.xsibase.com.
“The Dirt Map shader [a plug-in created by Daniel Rind], specifically, was huge for us, and so was a script utility called XSI Camera Export [from MindThink Tools] that let us export our camera from XSI into After Effects, so that we could use some of the 3D functions in After Effects to layer in text and additional graphics,” says Slutsky. “That way, we could make 3D enhancements within a 2D compositing platform without constantly having to go back to a 3D environment.”
Slutsky adds that a new Softimage 4.0 organizational tool called Material Library also played a big role in organizing elements. “Material Library lets you group materials so you can export them from other scenes or share them among scenes,” he says. “The library can be set to automatically update for each scene using that element.”
