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Read S.D. Katz's review of Combustion 3.

Martin Square Productions is a three-person shop in Wellington, New Zealand, handling everything from camera work to compositing. We've gone from just doing print design, with apps like Illustrator and Photoshop, to producing full-blown motion graphics and 3D animation.

We needed a program for a wide range of jobs, from painting and animation to 3D compositing. We had begun to attract projects from films at 2K to :15 TV spots shot in DV, to documentaries on Beta SP. So we also needed a toolset that worked in different resolutions and color depths.

Discreet Combustion offered by far the best solution at the best price to meet these requirements. Since we bought the software, we are confident we can do whatever assignment anyone throws at us.

Most recently, Martin Square was chosen to complete a one-hour television documentary on the history of New Zealand animation. From Len Lye to Shrek flips back to the early years with a Pacific Rim pioneer creating animation by making scratches and splotches on film. From there, it goes right up to the artists who have achieved amazing digital feats on top movies today.

To add a light touch — and additional animated flair — the producers wanted to create a pencil character for the piece. The character would jump into certain scenes, see to it that different interview questions were asked, and would react to the animation clips. This, of course, meant heaps of compositing for us on top of the other CG painting, lighting, and live-action footage tweaks.

Fortunately, we were able to address these challenges using the new tools in Combustion 3. The JavaScript-based Expressions in version 3 allowed us to craft complex animations without having to keyframe each parameter.

This saved quite a bit of time. We could set things up quickly and change them using only one control instead of re-keyframing the sequence. We have also used this feature for our motion graphics jobs as a way to move text around and do fast out-of-focus effects.

Another major innovation that now comes with Combustion 3 is spline-based morphing and warping operators (offered by RE:Vision Effects' RE:Flex). Across our documentary we needed to composite this hand-drawn pencil onto complicated background plates. That meant we constantly needed to add shadows, reflections, and other visual cues to bind the animated footage with the background plates.

Rather than building everything in 3D to get the shadows right, we warped just the shadow over the object for a realistic and timesaving treatment. A number of animation clips needed further integration with the pencil animation and backgrounds. For that we were also able to warp and deform clips to moving backgrounds. Because of the solid integration of all of Combustion's core tools, we simply picked points on the RE:Flex splines and used the tracker to track into the background, without moving points around frame by frame.

Many other scenes for From Len Lye to Shrek required some sophisticated animation matching and painting. In one sequence, we needed to have electricity coming from a power cord, electrocuting the pencil, and emitting light. The Paint Operators in Combustion 3 are brilliant for this. They allowed us to hand animate and re-light the 3D scene, but do it in 2D. Another big plus: You can now create custom brush sets.

When our lighting, animation, and compositing was done, the Edit Operators added in the new version let us assemble clips right inside Combustion. Some might wonder why that's important, since we run Combustion on a Macintosh G4 with Final Cut Pro. But it's great to have the flexibility to do basic editing and transitions in Combustion without having to access a nonlinear editing application.

The new Timeline Markers extend this flexibility further. We now have easier ways to time text and animation to music. You can do a rough pre-pass on your project at low resolution, lay down markers to beats, then go back and time your animation to the markers.

All of these features are pretty helpful on their own, but they are especially powerful when you pack them together to tackle a particularly difficult job, such as the painting and compositing in From Len Lye to Shrek for a shot with a zoetrope. We had footage of this antique, wheel-like device encircled with still images that face its interior. Spinning the wheel created the illusion of motion.

However, the material we received of the zoetrope already included still images. We needed to paint out those existing images and replace them with animation clips.

Working in Combustion 3, we painted out all the original sequences to produce clean, white frames. Still in Combustion, we added scratches for a more authentic look. We then used the RE:Flex tools to curve a 2D square onto a 3D shape, using it to project the shape of a card. By locking things up in the Edit Operator, we could automatically control the RE:Flex operator with no rework, even if we needed to change out all of the animation.

For all of the complex scenes in this project, Combustion 3 gave us tools to create glows, shadows, smoke, lightning, and more. Applying the correct effects allowed us to plausibly drop our pencil character into any given scene. Even in difficult scenes, say when there was an LCD screen behind our character, creating a reflection around the pencil edge was simply a matter of adding in two operators and switching the alpha channel to the background.

We can do frame-by frame painting, excellent keying, and now great RE:Flex morphing. In one click, we can add film grain. For tracking and color correction, we have the added benefit of easily exporting all setups for finishing in Discreet Flint and Flame. We save money in online because the work is locked off and sorted.

Combustion is even faster than before. I prep almost everything on a laptop PC; the optimization for the Pentium 4M chip makes that work very quickly. We are now enjoying fast clip manipulation and motion blurring that are often twice as fast as those of Combustion 2. When I come to the office, 90 percent of the graphics, animation, and compositing work is timed and ready to go. The Mac-PC workflow functions seamlessly; our systems networked together straight away. Copying and opening Combustion files back and forth works fine.

Discreet's newest version of Combustion takes a toolset we love even further. This reinforces the fact that we never really produce anything finished unless it goes through Combustion first.

Chris Williamson is a freelance compositor working out of Wellington, New Zealand. Among other projects, Williamson is currently completing work on From Len Lye to Shrek, produced by Cobalt VFX, a visual effects company in Wellington, New Zealand. He can be reached at chris@martinsquare.co.nz.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.