And for you animation savvy people, here’s some technical notes:

The Box Tops pile was animated using nParticles in Maya and by using instanced geometry on the particle simulation for the Box Tops and the dollars. Everything else in the scene was key-framed, including the collision dollars when the items pop out of the pile.

If you show any interest in any other part of the process, send me a e-mail and I’d be more than happy to respond!

Pixel Farm Credits

Director
Tony Mills

3D Artist + Animator + Compositor
Joe Russo

Sound Designers
Jesse Marks
Ken Chastain

Here’s a quick recap of this project:

At Pixel Farm, we worked on History Channel’s MonsterQuest Season 4, creating CG elements for 9 episodes over a course of 5 months, starting back in October 2009. It was around 30 seconds – 1 minute of animation per episode, depending on the content of the show.

Enjoy!

Pixel Farm Credits

MonsterQuest Season 4 Creature FX

Creative Director + Lead Compositor
Tom Doeden

Lead 3D Artist + Animator
Joe Russo

Reel

Edit
Joe Russo

Title Graphics
Chad Retrum
Joe Russo

Sound Designers
Jesse Marks
Ken Chastain

HillBilly Beast
Joe Russo

Mothman

3D Character Artist + Texture Artist
Jim Van Den Bogart

3D Character Rigging Artist + Character FX Artist (Fur & Dynamic Wings) + 3D Environment Artist + Animator + 3D Lighting Artist + Compositor
Joe Russo

Shark

3D Artists + Animators + Compositors
Amanda Nelson
Joe Russo

Piranha

3D Character Rigging Artist
Matt Pearson

3D Artists + Animators + Compositors
Amanda Nelson
Joe Russo

Snake

3D Character Rigging Artists
Chad Retrum
Llyod Travis

3D Artist + Animator + Compositor
Chad Retrum

Lizard Monster

3D Character Artist
Billy Thiex

3D Character Rigging Artist + 3D Environment Artist + FX Artist (Smoke) + Animator + 3D Lighting Artist + Compositor
Joe Russo

America’s Wolfman

3D Character Artists
Jim Van Den Bogart
Matt Pearson

3D Character Rigging Artist + 3D Character FX Artist (Fur)
Joe Russo

Animator + 3D Environment Artist
Amanda Nelson

3D Lighting Artists + Compositors
Amanda Nelson
Joe Russo

Sierra Sasquatch

3D Artist + Animator + Compositor
Joe Russo

3D Environment Artists
Amanda Nelson
Joe Russo

Additional Animator (Background Sasquatch)
Amanda Nelson

Additional Compositing On Every Episode
Tom Doeden

This plays 40 minutes before the game starts, on the big screen. So if you go to a Twins game, look out for it! Enjoy!

Pixel Farm Credits

Director
Kurt Angell

Producers
Bill Kruse
Paul Sadeghi

Designer + Animator
Amanda Nelson

3D Modeling Artists + Texture Artists
Amanda Nelson
Joe Russo

FX Artists
Eric Schulist
Joe Russo
Rich Haesemeyer

3D Lighting Artists
Amanda Nelson
Joe Russo

Compositors
Amanda Nelson
Eric Schulist
Joe Russo

End-Tag Animators & FX Artists
Chad Retrum
Eric Schulist
Kurt Angell

Sound Designer
Ken Chastain

I worked on the end part where the ball collides with the text and everything shatters, using particles instancing & keyframe animation to achieve the effect. The main challenge of this project was figuring out the timing for the slow motion. To do this we animated a moderately paced timing, and changed the “by frame” at render time to get more or less frames. Because of this extended sub-frame sampling, we had to sub-frame sample our particles too, which took a really long time to simulate. But after all of that, we created something of insanity…and everyone felt great about it.

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Modeling Artists + Texture Artists
Chad Retrum
Eric Schulist
Matt Pearson

3D Artists + Animators + FX Artists + Compositors
Chad Retrum
Joe Russo
Rich Haesemeyer

Sound Designers
Jesse Marks
Ken Chastain

The final animation I worked on for the show. I reused & altered the sasquatch I created for the first episode, and added a younger version.

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Character Artist + Animator + Lighting Artist + Compositor
Joe Russo

3D Environment Artists
Amanda Nelson
Joe Russo

Additional Animator (Background Sasquatch)
Amanda Nelson

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Character Artists
Jim Van Den Bogart
Matt Pearson

3D Character Rigging Artist + Character FX Artist (Fur)
Joe Russo

Animator + 3D Environment Artist
Amanda Nelson

Lighting Artists + Compositors
Amanda Nelson
Joe Russo

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Character Artist
Billy Thiex

3D Character Rigging Artist + CG Environment Artist + FX Artist (Smoke) + Animator + Lighting Artist + Compositor
Joe Russo

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Character Artist
Jim Van Den Bogart

3D Character Rigging Artist + Character FX Artist (Fur & Dynamic Wings) + 3D Environment Artist + Animator + Lighting Artist + Compositor
Joe Russo

This particular piece is called The Creature Holodeck which plays early in the show, describing the creature through V.O. and motion.

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Artist + Animator + Compositor
Joe Russo

Here is my submission for The Challenge. The topic was Winter. I chose to mimic micro photography with showing a small section of ice found in a cave or something.

I animated the “Standability” section and the final hero shot of the Corn Bin building and transforming into the coffee mug. One of my co-workers figured out a efficient way to change rotation direction on the cubes using mel scripting and custom attributes. All you would need to do is translate it in a direction and it would rotate 90 degrees per grid unit. Without this the project would not have been possible within the deadline, since each cube basically needed to be individually animated.

For example, my workflow for the corn bin was to animate one cube or a row of cubes, copy, paste, offset timing, followed by manual refinement of each cube based on where the camera was. Particles, dynamic sims, etc were just not giving us the result needed, so we went with the most straight forward approach. It was a lot of grunt work, but a good learning experience for pipelining / animation efficiency.

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Artists + Animators
Chad Retrum
Eric Schulist
Joe Russo
Pail Wilson
Rich Haesemeyer
Tom Doeden

Compositors
Eric Schulist
Rich Haesemeyer
Tom Doeden

Colorist
Dave Sweet

Morning

Hello! More professional work, and I’m really excited about this one!

For this, I built a new model shoe for New Balance and animate it in the same style as their previous commercials. They sent us the sole in CAD format which was converted in Maya to geometry. I took that into 3ds Max, cleaned it up a bit and separated the pieces out for animation. For the top, I used the CAD sole as my template for rough proportions and photographs / reference of the real shoe they sent us, breaking up all the parts I think would need to be animated.

I had to tweak the top part quite a bit before approval, in which I finalized the UVS and exported back into Maya. From there I used a combination of blendshapes and bend deformers with basic rotation and translation animation of the shoe. As I was animating we referenced my scene so we could texture / light / render simultaneously. It was about a 3 week turnaround, and I gotta say, it went pretty smoothly and had tons of fun!

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Artist + Animator
Joe Russo

3D Texture & Lighting Artist + Compositor
Eric Schulist

Steve Glutton

Ah, finally some personal stuff! Here are animation tests for the characters of my next animated short: Ninja… Squirrel?!

These are mostly for motion timing / flow and acting. There are obvious intersections with cloth and skinning that will be addressed on a per shot basis (although skinning has been fixed now). These also have allowed me to set up my render layers and make master character files so that I don’t have to worry about render layer setup once my shots are done, for the characters at least.

Enjoy!

Finally! Another post! I recently received the final ad images that I posed and rendered the Michelin Man into. It was a simple workflow, pose the Michelin Man, set up different render layers (fill light, key light, main, eye, reflection, etc) and tweak it like crazy in photoshop. He’s such a happy puffy man…. More to come!

I was not responsible for the ad design, just incorporating Michelin Man .

Ok, this update isn’t anything visually spectacular, and it’s not supposed to be. I want to show the technical process of something that is fast and looks simple, because there are still a lot of steps that go into live action tracking / integration.

The spot needed a 3D grapple with a rope to be tracked in, so I modeled the grapple, hand tracked it in maya using the footage as a backplate, simulated the rope using nCloth, and simulated the smoke using FumeFX.

Pixel Farm Credits

3D Artist + Animator + FX Artist
Joe Russo

Compositor
Tom Doeden