Taking the Fright Out of Animating Monster House

Monster House is an innovative blend of fantasy and reality, combining the details and subtleties of the performance-capture techniques developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks, and first used in Robert Zemeckis' 2004 The Polar Express, with the magic of animation in a dynamic, expressive 3D universe.

Imageworks artist, Dave Bleich, lead matte painter on Monster House, talked to us about his experience working on the film and how MAXON CINEMA 4D helped solve some of the unique challenges the film presented.

"In terms of process, all shows vary, and all visual effects supervisors have different ways they want to work. The pipeline is developing as we go, and we learn from other shows and are starting to dial in what the creative directors and visual effects supervisors prefer. On Monster House, we were developing environments that would be used as a lighting tool. The process was that we would get all the information from Maya and go to our setup in Photoshop and CINEMA 4D, then work back and forth between these applications. We used scripts to take layout environments, camera work and information out of Maya, then we would export the environment once and bring it into CINEMA 4D."

"I was doing a lot of technical setups, since we had to render all these backgrounds, and I was training some of the assistant technical directors on how to use CINEMA 4D to run things in the pipeline along a lot faster. It streamlined the process and allowed me to work on other things rather than rendering out over 1000 shots of the sky. Four of the assistant technical directors were trained in how to use the software and set up environments with CINEMA 4D. It took only a few weeks for them to learn because the interface is very intuitive and [due to the fact that] technical directors are technically inclined anyway. A few of them got so crafty that they wrote out a bunch of scripts and piped it in for themselves to render out environments. It allowed them to take care of the painting of the skies."

"Having the assistant technical directors learn the application and be able to run these environments out for us was fantastic. The assistant technical directors were surprised how easy it was to run, not heavy like some lighting packages, so they were able to drop it in and go. Some really push CINEMA 4D, working with shaders and lighting, and some just use the bare minimum of what they need. Some have more of a 2D background, and some have no background and are just learning, but pick it up real fast. I've had the opportunity to see a couple of the artists I work with learn the software and really enjoy working with it"

"I was solving a lot of problems as the lead matte painter on the show, and working with the visual effects supervisor. I was interacting with them regularly and got to show them what this tool can do [with regard to] previsualization, making tricky shots possible, and in some cases being able to pull off a shot in half the time. We've had the opportunity to push the software and show CG supervisors and the rest of the facility how we can use this application. The visual effects supervisor was able to call us in right before they wanted to final a shot in order to touch it up here and there. We could quickly do lighting and create shaders for objects. We made full use of the render speed, which was extremely fast and sharp."

"We first started using CINEMA 4D around The Polar Express for projection matte painting. The pipeline supervisors showed us BodyPaint 3D [and its texture painting [applications], and we thought it was pretty interesting. The engineers at MAXON asked us to come up with a wish list of capabilities, and in a few weeks they had a prototype. They started building and have been building on top of that since, as they've been working with us and getting our feedback. They've worked on making the software very artist-friendly. The fact that we can customize it to how we like to work, and (the fact that) it's not buried so we can open it up and be ready to go is invaluable. CINEMA 4D is extremely flexible, which means I can spend more time painting than dealing with the technical side of things."

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