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MillimeterInside DreamWorks Animation
Apr 1, 2000 12:00 PM, Dan Philips
Dan Philips was DreamWorks' digital supervisor on The Road to El Dorado and co-head of effects on The Prince of Egypt. During his five years at the studio's animation facility in Glendale, California, Philips played a key role in building DreamWorks' digital infrastructure for producing so-called "traditional" animated films. Here, he offers Millimeter readers an inside peek at the studio's transition to a digital pipeline from 1995 to the present, a time when the facility was in constant production on The Prince of Egypt, The Road to El Dorado, and Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (scheduled for 2001 release).
Our digital development at DreamWorks Animation over the last five years has been directly linked to the creative demands placed on us by The Prince of Egypt, The Road to El Dorado, and the upcoming Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. Those films caused innovations out of necessity. They also led to the ongoing development of an animation department that was significantly more digital than before-a department designed to produce traditional, 2D-animated films through a combination of traditional and digital tools.
One example of this journey to increased digital production is our co-development, along with Silicon Studios, of a proprietary "Exposure" camera and integration tool set for use on The Prince of Egypt and The Road to El Dorado. We badly needed 2D/3D camera and artwork integration tools to give us greater speed and flexibility in combining a wide range of images created both by hand and digitally. Until recently, in combining 2D and 3D images, we had to lock literally everything to a preliminary 3D camera move, which we tediously plotted on paper frame by frame and at fielding sizes that often made it difficult to draw and lock the characters to their surroundings. The development of Exposure finally gave us a software application that permitted our artists to view and work on 2D and 3D images in one environment.
Developing this ability to design, construct, and see elements from different dimensions together and at practical working sizes has been central to our ongoing 2D/3D integration process. As El Dorado wrapped production, in fact, we went beyond Exposure's linking abilities with a new in-house tool called Toonstage, which is now replacing Exposure as Spirit production begins.
But this is only one example of the many challenges we have faced in our ongoing effort to create a digital path for our films. Following are several others that confronted us during the heat of production on our first three movies.
3D Joins a "Traditional" Pipeline As we entered production on The Prince of Egypt and preproduction on El Dorado, our desire to integrate the 2D and 3D processes brought initial changes across multiple departments. Solutions developed by our Animation Production Technology Group immediately paid dividends on The Prince of Egypt, but that film proved to be only the beginning of our studio's digital transition. The evolution eventually expanded to include every production department and was affected by both our own internal goals and changes within the industry.
For The Prince of Egypt, we linked Exposure to our 2D animation tool, a specialized version of Cambridge Animation's Animo, and the 3D software we were using at the time, Alias PowerAnimator. As production went forward on El Dorado, we saw that PowerAnimator was quickly being replaced throughout the industry by a new tool: Maya. Thus, we began slowly phasing Maya in and Alias out, while simultaneously developing Toonstage to take Exposure's place in linking our version of Animo with Maya.
Some difficult moments arose late in the production of El Dorado because we had to do some temporary, custom jury-rigging to handle certain scenes as we began switching from Alias to Maya. For Spirit, however, Maya and Toonstage are now up and running, providing connectivity between our 2D and 3D tools.
Even before the move from Exposure to Toonstage, the transition to Maya began during the early days of production of El Dorado and was spurred by the fact that we wanted to rely exclusively on Maya for all 3D work in Spirit. We began the transition during El Dorado by using Maya only for complex effects scenes, while still using Alias and Exposure for most standard shots. This approach made it easier for us to leave Alias behind as we started Spirit.
During our transition to Maya, we also realized that we would have to substantially change the way we dealt with 3D models within our pipeline. We came to understand that our desire to incorporate 3D models into a "traditional" animation process would require us to standardize how we built and used 3D models. During the early days of El Dorado, our various departments and artists were not using standard tools and procedures for 3D models. That created difficulty as models traveled from one department to another. Unfortunately, we did not restructure to address this problem until very late in the making of El Dorado. Since that time, we have hired Marty Havran to reorganize this process among all the production departments working with 3D models on Spirit, and that reorganization is ongoing.
With work on Spirit now under way, the transition to digital tools and processes and our general increased use of 3D models in traditionally animated films has permitted the digital equivalent of true "cinematography" to find its way into our movies. That's why, among other things, we have changed the name of our weekly "CGFX" meeting to "Digital Methods"-to acknowledge the fact that this digital transition has rapidly grown beyond our Effects department.
For example, our decision to move 3D crowd-character work from the Effects department to the Character Animation department exemplifies the fact that character animation now incorporates digital processes. To help with that transition, software developer Mike Ullner changed our 3D crowd-character procedures from our The Prince of Egypt setup. Back then, our crowd work traveled from Alias models to Softimage animation to DW simulation (DreamWorks simulation) for crowd placement to the "mArias" MentalRay Toonshader we used (so named for software developer Michael Arias) to RenderMan to Animo. Now, for Spirit, we will follow a process that takes us from Maya models to Mayaanimation to Mike Ullner's new DW-crowd choreography tool set to RenderMan to Animo. In this process, we will also begin using more 3D geometric models than before.
That's an important step forward for our crowd work because it allows us to use the best images-whether 2D, 3D, or a combination of both-to optimize crowd scenes according to each project. In Spirit, for example, we will be inserting more 3D models into our crowd/herd scenes, since crowds in that film will consist of herds of horses, which have more depth to them than two-legged humans. Thus, we can now refine those crowd sequences for the creative needs of this particular project, less hindered by limits on the use of 3D models within our pipeline.
In fact, all the 3D character modeling work throughout El Dorado-done by Marc Chavez, Ryan Roberts, Michele Cowart, and Michael Spokas-was of a much higher standard than the good work done on The Prince of Egypt. Director Don Paul wanted more animation control on major characters this time and a better character design match with traditionally drawn characters. This approach will carry far beyond El Dorado, as our 3D character group eventually becomes fully integrated with our traditional animation department. The studio is currently hard at work training selected traditional character animators on certain aspects of 3D animation using Maya. The goal there is to have an animation department that no longer distinguishes between 2D and 3D character animators, with most artists capable of utilizing any tools-digital or traditional-to do their work.
Effects Strategy Over the past five years, we've also seen an evolution in our use of commercially available effects packages such as Elastic Reality. We first used Elastic Reality to give life to cloud background paintings on The Prince of Egypt. Now we also use its warping capabilities to give limited animated life to previously non-moving, old "held-cel" characters. For El Dorado, animator Bob Lyss also used Elastic Reality to animate sails, ropes, and other items on 2D painted ships.
Another recent adjustment has allowed our Background department to work with Layout-department artists to build, view, and apply painted colors and textures to 2D and 3D environments and better integrate characters into shots. Likewise, as work progressed on El Dorado, our artists innovated new digital methods for using projected, painted artwork. Since El Dorado, we have been able to mix the projected artwork with actual 3D painting extensions and use Alias 3D StudioPaint to retain painterly characteristics even while an object is turning, tumbling, or falling into view dimensionally. This advance was applied to great effect in shots of the giant water tower seen during El Dorado's climax.
Many of our traditional background and effects artists learned to use digital tools as The Prince of Egypt finished and El Dorado began. For instance, our Background department went more digital for El Dorado. Using Fractal Paint and PhotoShop on Macs, these background painters were able to do tweaks, versions, and fixes more quickly than in the past. Several artists also began their work traditionally and then scanned it in to elaborate, extend, version, and complete the art.
Meanwhile, other artists in the Effects department attempted new production methods that combined 2D drawn, traditional artwork with 2D and 3D digital image drawing and creation work, including a couple of new techniques we nicknamed "VecTones" and "Cheezypoof Dust." Some of this work involved digitally drawing vectors directly onto the rendered image of a piece of art, whether it originated as a hand-drawn image or as a CG picture. That saved us lots of interdepartmental travel, physical checking, processing, and digital checking time. It also showed us that keeping the artwork digital, instead of going in and out from the computer to paper and back, was more practical.
Other improvements allowed us to create 3D spheres with limited 3D lighting to produce "dust" effects. These effects animated more quickly than drawing them by hand, with increased levels of control for color, placement, and transpa rency. While Bud Myrick led the 3D digital-effects team and Steve Wood led the 2D traditional-effects team in this effort, a small team led by Jane Gotts focused solely on the creation and digital manipulation of strictly 2D, CG images during the making of El Dorado.
The lava in El Dorado is a good example of all three effects groups working together to achieve a composite effect. We assigned two artists, Sean McLaughlin and Ed Coffey, to create the 3D and 2D digital and traditional lava elements, while three others-Jane Gotts, Colin Sittig, and Stephen Krauth-used a combination of digital methods and mattes to add hot dust, steam, lava geysers, and particle splashes on top. That development directly built on previous work from The Prince of Egypt in which we did more modest, digital environmental effects.
New Looks Thanks to new software developed in-house, El Dorado also features a host of effects we couldn't do at all on The Prince of Egypt. These include graduated eye tones and "gobo" leaf shadows on several characters, among others.
The "gobo" effect, in particular, has allowed us to animate and cast foliage shadows onto animated characters as they move through the jungle. This is an effect that would have been too tedious and costly to do with frame-by-frame, hand-drawing, scanning, color modeling, and comping techniques. New tools and processes allow us to bring flat, traditional art quickly into the computer, digitally inflate the matte of those pictures using a 3D light source to render rounded curvature onto the picture, and then apply stencil-like "gobo" leaves to the rounded and inflated digital element frame by frame, before moving to the final compositing stage.
Another El Dorado advancement builds upon a theory first tried by two of our artists, Doug Cooper and Henry LaBounta, on The Prince of Egypt. Doug Ikeler, our effects-sequence lead on El Dorado, built on their ideas to attach to, or drive, traditionally drawn animation cycles using 3D particle animation. The result of his work is a new tool we call "Spryticle," which allowed us to create complex and rapid white-water effects, such as the ones seen in El Dorado's climactic scene.
The particle animation utilizes flat, digital "sprite" cards that carry playback of traditional 2D animation. The cards can be bent, curved, stretched, illuminated, or manipulated to arrive at visually pleasing compositions of great complexity, all riding on a 3D water surface animated in Maya and rendered out using Pixar's MTOR (Maya to RenderMan) and RenderMan products.
These are but a handful of examples of the changes taking place in our studio. In closing, it is important to note that DreamWorks is still working to perfect an organized way to distribute the use of digital tools throughout the entire production system. As is common in new environments, the need for this new system and the steps required to make it happen grew faster than our ability to recognize and deal with this rapidly spreading transition. In some ways, it has taken on a life of its own-but we're working on it.
