How Maxon BodyPaint 3D helped Rhythm & Hues Bring Yogi, Boo Boo, and a Turtle to Life in Yogi Bear Rhythm & Hues have been tapping BodyPaint 3D to paint texture maps for Yogi Bear.
Texture artists at the Academy Award-winning visual effects studio Rhythm & Hues have been tapping the powerful capabilities of Maxon BodyPaint 3D software to paint texture maps for some of today's most technically challenging feature films, including The Hulk, Mummy 3, They Came from Upstairs, The Fast and the Furious 4, Land of the Lost, Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian, Alvin and the Chipmunks 2: The Squeakuel, A-Team, Knight and Day and the soon-to-be released, Red Riding Hood.
In the new Warner Bros. film, Yogi Bear - an adaptation of the classic Hanna-Barbera The Yogi Bear Show - Yogi and his sidekick Boo Boo exist as fully animated CG characters that interact with a human cast in a largely live-action feature film. Director Eric Brevig's goal was to portray Yogi and Boo Boo, complete with twinkling eyes and wet noses, as characters that appear nearly as real as the actors. And to appeal to modern audiences, the film was shot entirely in stereoscopic 3D (S3D).
Using the latest S3D camera technology allowed the filmmakers to capture an incredible amount of visual detail and resolution, while the aggressive use of innovative cameras angles required a lot of careful planning and attention to detail. Maxon BodyPaint 3D was used throughout the film to create texture and projection paintings of the CG characters, ensuring that the CG fit seamlessly into the live action footage.
As texture painter Jennifer Stratton put it, "Creating all those textures and shaders was a big challenge. We had four texture painters working on the film, and Maxon BodyPaint 3D helped us keep hundreds of textures organized and consistent."
Bringing a fresh 3D film look, yet successfully maintaining the visual integrity of the classic 2D television series, necessitated a cross-team workflow. Stratten explained, "At Rhythm & Hues, BodyPaint 3D is a mandatory tool for the texture department to use for texture map projections and painting. It's also the department's software of choice for evaluating UV layout, and it's a way for us to quickly provide a snapshot for viewing our flat maps on a model. We use it to bring in CG models, quickly import and export large numbers of maps with layers, clean up seams, and maintain close cooperation with other departments to meet tight deadlines required by production schedules."
"BodyPaint 3D is vital to our pipeline," Stratten continued. "It also allows us to work with a large number of file types that can be recognized by the studio's proprietary software. One of the key advantages for using BodyPaint 3D is the freedom it gives texture painters to keep many layers in their files while projecting, which allows them to make quick changes in a fast-paced production environment."
The Yogi Bear texture team used Maxon BodyPaint 3D to view several angles of a character's features at once. This was especially important because the CG Yogi and Boo Boo had to look like the original 2D animated characters no matter from which angle they were seen. In addition, the animation department was able to use guides created with BodyPaint 3D that were projected over the base textures to be more accurate with the characters' movements.
"During early character development," explained texture painter Wey Wong, "we used the software to paint basic color and textures in an effort to heighten mass appeal for these playful and mischievous characters."
"For Yogi and Boo Boo, as well as for a new character called the frog-mouthed turtle, BodyPaint 3D was mainly used to deliver fur maps, fur lookdev, texture projections, and to preview skin textures on the 3D models. The turtle in particular required texturing and layout of hundreds of scales on its body by painting directly on the 3D model.
Once the scale layout was approved it was used as a guide to quickly paint finely detailed textures in Photoshop and sculpt displacement in Zbrush, which boosted the overall efficiency of the creative team."
Set in the fictional Jellystone National Park, with live-action sequences filmed on location in New Zealand, the Rhythm & Hues texture painting team also created more than 100 props in various textures and colors for the CG characters to interact with, ranging from small leaves to Yogi's "Basket Nabber 2000", a practical, pedal-driven glider that was constructed from over 50 different items that Yogi had stolen from Jellystone National Park and its visitors.
"Thanks to BodyPaint 3D's easy-to-learn and navigate interface, along with the scripts and plugins, we could easily import and export all working textures onto the models, including cloth patterns, metal and plastic materials," Wong said, "It also lets us to easily switch back-and-forth between Photoshop and Bodypaint 3D across multiple UV sets to make sure the colors and textures were consistent with production design parameters."
The end result is that Yogi and Boo Boo appear to co-exist with the real world, while retaining some of the phantasmagorical essence of the classic 60s cartoon series in a modern, stereoscopic 3D family adventure film.
Rythm & Hues
www.rhythm.com
Offical Website
yogibear.warnerbros.com
