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Step-by-Step:
Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed

Mar 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff

When the cartoon world's top dog Scooby-Doo bounded onto movie screens in 2002, it was the CG animators at Rhythm & Hues who breathed 3D life into Scooby's familiar form. So when Warner Bros. tapped the film's director, Raja Gosnell, to do a sequel, L.A.-based R&H was in the “virtual dog” business once again.

”They upped the ante quite a bit,” says R&H visual effects supervisor Betsy Paterson, who worked on both Scooby-Doo movies. In a dance sequence with dozens of shots, Scooby does Travolta-style moves illuminated by flashing lights from a disco ball. “Scooby is wearing a disco suit and gold chains, as well as an Afro wig and sunglasses,” says Paterson. Having to completely animate Scooby in this garb would be labor-intensive, but R&H was spared that when the director said he wanted to be able to direct a dancer who could interact with the other dancers. The solution would be a body double onto which R&H would track and composite a 3D CG Scooby head.

”We picked a dancer who was a certain height and had small shoulders so that the overall proportions would feel right for Scooby,” explains Paterson. “The dancer wore lots of padding to make her look a little more dog-proportioned. We didn't want to go all the way to fully dog because she would have been a little encumbered. But the padding was really heavy — probably 20lbs. or 30lbs. — and she also had to wear prosthetic dog paws.”

Most crucial was the headgear that would establish where Scooby's eyeline would be when the animation was completed — about a foot higher than the dancer's eyes. Since many of the actors in the scene were extras who weren't used to relating to an invisible character, they needed to have that eyeline reference.

”It ended up being a bit difficult,” admits Paterson. “The eyeline piece that we'd planned to use didn't fit because the actress had to wear a hood to cover her hair and make a contrast line with the neck of the suit. We had to construct a replacement very quickly. It looked silly but it did the trick.”

Paterson had data collectors on-set so that Scooby's CG head could be accurately tracked into the plate photography. “We didn't need too many tracking markers because pieces of the set were high-contrast enough to track. We recorded lots of camera data, and we also had a LIDAR scan of the set that really helped to lock in the camera tracking. It doesn't really save time, but it does make things more accurate.”

Back at R&H, trackers first hand-rotoscoped the disco suit to prepare it for the animators. Not much of the plate photography had to be removed — except for the eyeline headgear — since the suit had been designed so that the dancer was down inside it as much as possible. Like everything else in this shot, the roto and tracking was done within R&H's proprietary software system called Voodoo, which runs on Linux machines.

The animators working on the head and neck animation were able to reuse the character model from the first Scooby-Doo film, notes Paterson. “But we attached it to an adjusted body model to fit inside the disco suit. Then there was a blend between the two. A lot of technical work was involved in making a blend between the deformations on the model that was inside of the suit and Scooby's head. We did update all the character's rigging, and the way his skin moves. Because this was a sequel, we built on the foundations from the last film and added more subtleties.”

”We also updated Scooby's fur,” adds Paterson. “Warner Bros. asked us to make the fur a bit longer and have more variation in the texture and to give him a wetter nose.” Fortunately, Scooby's fur wasn't long enough to flop around, but his Afro wig had to bounce when he danced. “We did that with dynamics that we dialed up and down,” explains Paterson. “It was pretty automated.”

Of course, rendering the CG wig wasn't trivial. “In shots with lots of motion blur, that Afro took a very long time to render,” says Paterson. “We regularly break out all of the hair and fur into at least three layers: a main one, a bounce layer, which is sort of ambient lighting, and then a sheen layer, which is the overall shininess. We balance those three together in the comp.”

Compositing the CG into the plate required lots of edge work to marry the fur on Scooby's neck to the practical suit. But an equally crucial task was making the flickering disco lights play on Scooby like they did on his fellow dancers. “They had a giant fan over the set making all the lights flicker as it rotated,” Paterson recalls. “We had to come up with a simulation of that so that Scooby's lighting flickered as he moved in and out of blue lights and red lights and strobe lights and flashes caused by people taking pictures. It's pretty elaborate.

“Our biggest clue was how the lighting interacted with the suit and with the other actors around him. Scooby has a dance partner with curly dark hair, so she was a good reference for us. We had to be careful to match what was going on the set. In a few cases we did things like averaging the luminance changes and applying that to the lights, but most of it was done by hand. The sequence is probably about three minutes long, but took us months and months.”

Credit Roll

Director - Raja Gosnell

DP - Oliver Wood

Visual Effects Supervisor - Peter Crosman

For Rhythm & Hues:

Visual Effects Supervisor - Betsy Paterson

Animation Director - Leon Joosen

Light Comp Supervisor - Edwin Rivera

Animation Supervisor - Larry Weinberg

Animator - Roberto Smith

Compositor - Jen Howard

Scene Lighter - Ron Arredondo

Tracking Supervisor - Sam Nunez

Plate Data Coodinator - Ivan Hayden

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.