Aixsponza Uses C4D for Checker Tobi Feature Film

Learning can be fun if you make it that way, and that’s probably why Checker Tobi is so popular. Produced for German television, the children’s show is hosted by Tobi, an exuberant young man who checks out ideas and questions in exciting ways that spark kids’ natural curiosity. Checker Tobi is such a hit, its creators decided recently to take the show to the big screen for a feature-length exploration of the secret to life on Earth – water. (Watch the official trailer here.)

Knowing how animation-heavy the film would be, German production company, Megaherz, teamed up with renowned 3D design studio, Aixsponza, to create roughly 15 minutes of motion graphics and VFX for the film’s explanatory sequences. Matthias Zabiegly, Aixsponza’s 3D lead and set supervisor, headed up the studio’s team who primarily relied on Cinema 4D, ZBrush and Houdini while working on the film on and off for nearly nine months. Matthias Zabiegly talks about the use of 3D graphics in this project in our VFX Work Video Report. (See the Houdini setups for the volcano, snowball and rocket simulations here and here.)

Going for a Handmade Look

Before collaborating on this project, Megaherz worked with Aixsponza on several smaller jobs, including medical visualizations and TV show openers. Looking back, Zabiegly thinks those served as test projects that gave Megaherz the confidence to tap them for a full-length feature. It helped, too, that both companies are based in Munich and use a lot of the same software, including Cinema 4D.

Work began with a briefing led by Megaherz Animation Director Robert Mayer, who explained that the visuals needed to look like someone who knew what they were doing made them at home. “Not something a five-year-old put together in some weird, awkward way,” Zabiegly explains. “More like something maybe a really talented 16-year-old would make.” Though Aixsponza usually storyboards in 3D, concepting for this film began with Megaherz doing rough drawings on paper. Once those were finalized with Director Martin Tischner, Zabiegly’s team started doing layouts in 3D.

“Robert had some ideas in his head that weren’t in the storyboards, so we worked together on layouts,” Zabiegly says. In keeping with the handmade look, they talked about stop-motion but decided against trying to fake it in 3D. Instead, they opted to take advantage of feature film’s 24 frames and give traditional 3D animation a handmade look by adding a lot of details and irregularities, like fingerprints, scratches and visible brushstrokes, to the textures of every object.

Making Complex Topics Interesting and Fun

Normally, Checker Tobi is a 30-minute production, so extrapolating the series into a 90-minute film required a more complicated storyline. Checker Tobi and the Secret of Our Planet begins with Tobi aboard a ship fighting pirates. After falling into the sea, he finds a riddle in a bottle. To solve it, viewers must go with him on a journey to a volcanic island in the Pacific, the Arctic, beneath the sea and into space. While this adventure looks kid-friendly, themes that it touches on – Earth’s origin, the Ice Age, climate change – were complex and based on real-life science.

Working together, Aixsponza and Megaherz focused on creating motion graphics and VFX that helped explain the science while also keeping children engaged with what was happening on screen. To keep things moving smoothly in the editor, Aixsponza built everything as simply as possible in Cinema 4D. As he does with most projects, Zabiegly began by making art boards for inspiration by collecting images online of specific things he and his team needed to make. In this case, a rocket, a whole lot of toys and a train: “I really like to pull images from the Internet and put them together into a big Photoshop document so I can go in there and circle what I want and say, ‘Okay, I like this part of the rocket, and this exhaust thingy and that other part’ and then put it all together using C4D’s Volumes,” he explains.

Take a look behind the scenes of the VFX work of the Checker Tobi feature film:

Adding a Lot of Love

One of the reasons Aixsponza enjoyed working on this project so much was that they had the time they needed to add love. “There was no big rush, so we got to add in all kinds of high-level detail,” Zabiegly says. Plasticine volcanoes were modeled from a cube in C4D and textured to highlight fissures and steaming lava. Beautiful blue Earth is covered with trees, lions, dolphins, birds, elephants and other creatures that began as pen-and-pencil drawings by illustrators before being put on planes in Cinema 4D. Mossy-looking forest areas on the globe were created with C4D’s Hair. “It’s pretty basic modeling and texturing, but we were able to put a lot of love into this and it shows, and we’re really happy about that.”

The rocket that launched into space with the tiny tardigrade inside started out as a drawing, its handmade look accentuated by the actual brushstrokes Zabiegly put on its side, as if a kid had just finished painting it. For the rocket, he used traditional poly modelling techniques, starting with the rough shape that was improved during the approval process. C4D and ZBrush were used to create the tardigrade, an, eight-legged micro-animal that Tobi finds living in a bit of moss while investigating what lives underwater.

The film ends by circling back to the theme of water as Tobi makes a stop in the Indian city, Mumbai, where it only rains half the year. Aixsponza’s challenge was to render Tobi’s notebook in the pouring rain. (Learn more about that scene here.) “We did the simulations in Houdini and then brought everything into Cinema 4D and rendered in Octane to get the right look,” Zabiegly explains. “Everyone is glad that it’s raining, and the scene really brings home the idea that water is so important to all living things.”