In the bad old days, 2-D animation was 2-D, 3-D was 3-D, and rarely did the two mesh—except with a great deal of work. A smooth integration between the different animation techniques required meticulous design in the preproduction stages. But that also left little room for error or innovation, since the graphic artists were working with different software and hardware.
Times could be changing, however, thanks to the new Animo 3 software, introduced in February by Cambridge Animation Systems, Cambridge, England. Animo 3, say its inventors and some users, combines the best of both worlds: the warm "cartoon" style of 2-D animation with the added depth and photorealism of 3-D.
"A lot of our customers are increasingly mixing 2-D and 3-D," explains Brian Tyler, VP of sales and marketing at Cambridge Animation Systems. "Animators like the photorealistic style of cartoon animation but also want to employ the more emotional characters you have in a 2-D drawing. Photorealism is fine with a model of the Titanic, but if you want to get people involved in the cartoon animation, you want expressive faces."
The original Animo software was launched stateside in ’93 as a 2-D animation package and is now used by a range of clients. The software was recently employed by DMA, New York, in Sleepy’s Mattresses’ "Flying Mattress," directed by Tony Caio of DMA and freelance animator Phil Kimmelman, out of Time Warner, New York. DMA also utilized Animo for "Ellie’s Enchanted Garden," a spot for a new computer game of the same name, via Kidvertisers, New York. The spot’s live action was directed by Skip Roessel of Skip Roessel, New York; Caio handled the animation duties. The software was in ads for Old Navy and the New Mexico State Lottery. Animo is also being used by feature film animators, such as Warner Bros. Feature Animation which used Animo on The Iron Giant. The upcoming DreamWorks feature The Road To El Dorado also used Animo.
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Animo 3, which is currently shipping to clients across the U.S., takes the older system’s integration capabilities to a new level by allowing the 2-D and 3-D toolsets to overlap and operate together, so long as the user has the necessary plug-ins. Tyler says this provides much greater flexibility.
The software is embedded with a 3-D structure, or "harness," which allows users to work with the Scene III. That plug-in—which will be available at no cost to current Animo 2.5 users—reads models and scene files from two 3-D packages: Kinetix’s 3-D Studio MAX and Alias| Wavefront’s Maya. According to Tyler, Scene III creates an environment in which 3-D models, cameras, special effects, and lighting controls interact dynamically with 2-D elements.
All 2-D elements can be composited within the 3-D world, using the camera from the 3-D scene. The Animo 3-D node allows input of 2-D elements as texture planes, enabling an animator to move data between the two fields. The 2-D and 3-D-composited scenes can be rendered with Animo 3, which will display the 3-D components in a 2-D cartoon-rendering style. Users are then able to view and edit the cartoon rendering in 3-D Studio MAX and Maya.
Once art is scanned into Animo, the system preserves the hand-drawn look of the original material. "The key word is ‘editable,’" Tyler says. "When you are doing 2-D drawings, you can’t really edit them; with 3-D, you can tweak them. We are borrowing from the mathematics of 3-D [which allows tweaking] and from the look of 2-D."
Tyler stresses that another creative advantage of Animo 3 is that it permits artists to do their original drawings on paper, which will dramatically improve production speed. "People can still draw on paper," he explains, "but instead of having it copied onto a cel, it is scanned onto the computer and painted electronically." He says that not all the artists need to work on expensive computers. "Pencils and papers are cheap, and our scanning is good," he says. "This method cracks through the work-intensive cel painting process."
Such speed was a key attraction in Sept. ’99, when Pencil & Pepper Animation, a Cambridge-based animation studio, used Animo 3 to create the sponsorshop credits for West Match, a soccer review program. The credits, which were produced by Anglia Commercials (a division of Anglia Television, Norwich, England) for AWA Advertising and Marketing, Oxford, England, feature a 3-D soccer ball zooming across the screen.
"The commercial required a graphical, cartoon look," says Philip Pepper, a partner at Pencil & Pepper, and the director of the credits, which had to be completed in less than six days. "That amount of animation would have been too much to draw by hand in the time available. I knew Animo Scene III would be able to handle the project, even though we were just using a beta version of the software."
The soccer ball was modeled in 3-D Studio Max, and the Scene III cartoon shader was used to render the geometry as though it was drawn and then painted on a cel. "The cartoon shader gives the 3-D and 2-D elements the same graphic quality so that they fit together seamlessly in the shot," explains Pepper. "This got us away from the shiny, plastic look of some 3-D animation, and made it look like the ball was hand-drawn."
