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biohazard DEGENERATION

October 2008 [CG]

Key points in CG film production process

Production Workflow

Movie making requires a lot of people to work on multiple images. Thus to maintain the same quality throughout the work, we often use pre-visualization method.

First we created a rough draft of animatics. At this point CG objects are created with low polygon; however, duration and timing for dialogue are close to final version. This allows creators to understand the overall story and all to stand on the same start line. As we proceed, we apply CG animation to the rough cuts and make adjustments.

2D to 3D Character Conversion

Q.

There are new characters in the movie that do not appear in the game version. How did you design the new characters?

A.

Character designers designed the new characters. We tried to create 3D models from the drawings but since the illustrations were line drawings areas such as the nose were difficult to translate into 3D. Thus we collected images of real people and created images close to the characters and modeled the characters out of those resources.

Q.

How many new characters are introduced for this movie?

A.

There are 20 characters in total and 10 are main characters. It took approximately 6 months to do the modeling. Other then modeling, there were characters’ costumes and we asked our stylists to actually coordinate few clothes and we created 3D models from it. There was also an evil boss character which we revised the design several times. After we created the character we made an actual model for 3D scanning.

Q.

How did you balance the workload?

A.

There were total of 1300 cuts thus we wanted to make lighting and composition fairly simple. Instead of spending more time on compositing we thought that it would be more effective if we worked more on lighting. So we decided to focus on creating a good quality original image. In lighting process, we rendered one frame first. If it turned out good, then we rendered the rest. We used 50 PCs, total of 200CPUs to do the rendering. 100 cuts out of 1300 were for guideline purpose. In the last month we replaced the guidelines with final cuts.