3D World

Feature

Big VFX on a budget

“For VIA, the environments were hand-painted in

Photoshop in layers and those layers were imported

into After Effects, where I created the parallax and

did all my compositing and effects,” says Izzy Burton

of Blue Zoo. “The 3D modelling, rigging, animation

and rendering was in Maya. The hand-drawn 2D

animation was Photoshop again.”

Not all of this was in Burton’s technical comfort

zone, but that was partly the point of the project.

“Where there were gaps in my knowledge or skills,

I managed to teach myself, with a little advice here

and there from colleagues. There was a fair amount

of redoing things when I made silly mistakes, but it

was honestly the best way to learn the software.”

“One of the biggest challenges was integrating 3D

characters with the painterly 2D environments,” says

Tom Box. “We experimented with frame rates and

render styles, and settled on a stepped, lower-frame-

rate animation style to make it feel less synthetic.

The characters were rendered out with an ambient

shader with a single thresholded shadow pass for a

stylistic and minimal two-tone appearance.”

“What I was most happy with in A Drop is a

technique I wish other people would use more

often,” says Vanhoenacker. “I found that if

you track the shot perfectly, you have a direct

connection between the virtual world and what

was shot. So you put that as a setup inside your

world, then make the characters you’ve shot go at

the speed and trajectory you intended, and create

a virtual camera. That has some restrictions,

because you can’t go sideways or it will feel like

this is flat footage in a 3D world. But as long as

you stay roughly where the initial camera was, or

at least along the same Z-axis as this camera, you

get the illusion across.

“This virtual camera can pan left, can pan

right, can have a strong camera shake and can

make the shot wider or a bit more narrow. You

can change a lens or a number of things. And this

is very much what will blend the footage with

the CGI world, this virtual camera – so the way it

shakes will actually shake the footage, and shake

the virtual world together; the way it zooms in and

zooms out, it will put everything together. It’s a

very useful technique that gives you freedom and

much better results.”

Mixing hanD-DraWn anD Cg

integrating 3D characters with 2D

environments was a tricky challenge,

says tom Box anD izzy Burton of Blue zoo

FilMing a Fall

Julien vanhoenacker explains

a Better way to film a flying or

falling sequence

Vanhoenacker states that with A Drop,
the viewer is forced to make their own
choices regarding its interpretation