Hooked - Tantalizingly Tentacled

For quite some time, Cybertime studios wanted to create a short film whose main feature was the animation of a character. They wanted to showcase their skills as character animators and make a name for themselves. However, the project had to be put on the back burner again and again in order to complete the more important bread-and-butter projects for their clients. Eventually things worked out and the team was able to develop a concept for 'Hooked'. The six-member team fired up Cinema 4D R13 and started to visualize the story of a musical octopus.

Character animation in itself is quite complex and even animating a walking humanoid character demands solid animation skills and a good feel for timing and movements. At a studio such as Cybertime, an project like 'Hooked' is not something for a single individual - Cybertime works as a team: Modeling, rigging & constraints, shading, texturing, animation and rendering are each areas of specialization, which in turn are completed by specialists in those fields.

Character animators who want to create such a short film naturally need a fitting character with which to work. Therefore, the question of what type of character to animate was paramount - after all, Cybertime wanted to create a project that showcased high-end character animation. Human characters were considered, as were all types of four-legged creatures and even insects - until the idea of animating an octopus dawned on the team. On the one hand, this type of creature is not common in the field of animation and on the other hand, riggers and animators could have a field day and really show off their skills. In the end, the octopus' control system was so refined that each arm required only two controllers for which keyframes had to be created. The rest of the was procedural - rocking, wagging movements as well as the curling of the tentacles was controlled using sliders.

In addition to animating eight tentacles, the body and mouth also had to be animated. Even though the octopus wasn't able to speak it still had to beatbox its way through the ocean! Creating this special type of lip movement for an octopus was a challenge in itself. The team studied the mouth movements of real beat boxers, which were then adapted and stylized for the octopus. The team paid particular attention to the creation of the octopus' skin. Indepth research was done using various documentaries into the characteristics of octopus skin in order to reproduce this as realistically as possible in 3D. The octopus' skin has a unique translucency and also has the ability to change color and structure. Both of these characteristics had to be included in - and on - the octopus' skin. The skin was created using mostly procedural materials, accompanied by painted layers and the addition of Cinema 4D R13's new SubSurface Scattering feature. The material was made up of 36 shaders in total, which gave the team control over almost every single aspect of the material. For example, the SubSurface Scattering's contrast characteristic was a separate shader and as such could be animated individually.

In a perfect world, work on all parts of such a complex project would have to begin simultaneously to finish within a manageable amount of time. This was almost made possible thanks to Cinema 4D's XRefs. XRefs allow proxy models to be used to plan and create scenes and movements and can be used to transfer all changes made to a given object to other team members. This means that each team member can work on his or her own part of the project without getting in the way of another team member's work. XRefs made it possible to structure work in order to avoid much of the downtime for individual team members that often accompanies such a project.

The next step was to render the project, which was done using Cinema 4D's Multi-Pass feature. Each scene was rendered in approximately 30 passes, which were combined and fine-tuned in the compositing phase. A render farm of considerable size, based on 6-core Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition processors, was given the mammoth job of rendering this vast number of frames. Even though the final compositing touches had to be done on a laptop on the way to the film's presentation, the deadline was met for its debut!

One look at the result shows that all the work was well worth the effort. 'Hooked' is a unique short film that not only showcases Cybertime's outstanding skills (as well as all others involved) but also shows what can be done using Cinema 4D R13's impressive character animation tools!

Video on YouTube:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLaOSoNq0no

Making of Hooked Video on YouTube:
www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BrYLxRsqQfQ

Cybertime Website:
www.cybertime.at