The short group project film that we came up with for 2009 is titled Jaguar McGuire. It is a story about a conflict between a cat and his owner. The cat owner is none other than Jaguar McGuire, who, the audience finds out in the opening shot, is a daredevil. They also realize quickly that he must have had bad fortune in his career as he is in a body cast. The second shot shows Jaguar looking longingly at his cape and seemingly reminiscing over his career, which, as a newspaper headline reminds him, is definitely over. Just as we are feeling sorry for poor Jaguar McGuire, we realize that his troubles are far from over as we hear the first of many hundreds of meows that come from his cat. This troubled cat owner’s cat still requires the things that cats need. How will Jaguar quell the meowing? What ensues is a physical comedy that is sure to have you laughing.
During the struggles, there is a sequence where the cat climbs on top of Jaguar’s body cast. Jaguar has one free leg and tries to kick the cat off. Unfortunately, the cat jumps off just before the leg connects and instead of kicking the cat, Jaguar kicks his own injured leg out of the sling. The momentum propels his leg off the side of the bed and knocks over his table, which launches a vase of water (in slow motion) through the air. The vase crashes and short-circuits an electrical outlet. The sparks, sadly, catch the hem of the cape on fire. Jaguar watches in helpless horror as the flames burst up the length of the cape. Being a daredevil, Jaguar believes he can stop the fire and uses his only free foot to try to stomp the flames.
We’ll take a look at how the characters came to being in the 2D/3D process for this sequence. Many individuals were involved in the creation of this short animated film. We started with a team of 14 that met weekly in the classroom for 10 weeks and then worked with many more artists outside of the classroom as we continued through production and postproduction.
JAGUAR
Many designs by students were turned in for the main character Jaguar McGuire. Our art director, Jason Walling, compiled differ- ent ideas and ultimately came up with the page of design ideas you see in Figure 5.1. The character design allowed for a 2D leg, 2D head, and 2D wiggling toes and thumbs, all else on Jaguar being in a cast is 3D. You’ll note that the face and leg are com- pletely encased in bandages. It took some convincing, but we finally came to the agreement that at least the leg would not be covered in bandages. The reason for minimizing the bandages is that 2D bandages are incredibly hard to keep up with when ani- mating, and the cleanup on them would make it difficult to manage quality control. Anyone who has gone through 2D anima- tion classes has probably heard the evils of stripes, long flowing hair, prints on clothing, complicated ribbon work, and the like. All of these items can contribute to a more complex cleanup line, which if not managed well can cause strobing, jiggle, or otherwise distract from the animation. The bandages on the face stayed, because those were important to keep up the high level of frustra- tion needed throughout the film.
Our director, Clint Donaldson, took the concept and began working on ideas of how the 2D and 3D would work together. In
FIGURE 5.1 Jaguar McGuire character design by Jason Walling.
Figure 5.2, you see a visual target created by Clint that is our first depiction of a 2D Jaguar body inside of a 3D cast. From the very beginning, the idea of a 3D cast that was simply immovable backed our story of this trapped stuntman. It fit the story and I was pleased that the restriction I originally gave did not end up feeling like it was retrofitted into the story.
For the first 10 weeks of production we had a class of 14 indi- viduals. Many were tasked with modeling and texturing. The 3D
FIGURE 5.2 Jaguar McGuire’s 2D/3D visual target by Clint Donaldson.
cast rig was created along with a 3D version of the head and leg to be used as reference for the 2D animation. Figure 5.3a is a shot of the room with Jaguar’s prone body on the bed. Because this was a production pipeline with many individuals involved, we utilized the reference concept for everything. The model and the rig file were all referenced into the main blocked Maya scenes. This way the scenes could be pushed through the pipeline before the models or rigs were completed. As the modelers finished the higher-resolution versions of the models, they updated the refer- ence files. Then as the riggers finished rigging the files, those were updated. From the animator’s point of view, they animated a block version of the character in a block room one day and as the
production went along the room they referenced in became more high resolution and filled out until it was a completed room ready to render.
FIGURE 5.3a Jaguar McGuire 3D model. Head and leg are 2D reference stand-ins.
The animation was completed in Maya. The animators chose to animate the 3D stands-ins completely to better visualize the animation. Figure 5.3a shows keyframes of the 3D animation including the stand-in leg. The stand-in for the head is a low-res version. This was the rig that was pushed through earlier on in production. Later on in the production, a higher-res 3D head was developed to allow more perspective help for the 2D animators (Figure 5.3c). This higher-res head was necessary for other shots where we did a crazy zolly shot (a right of passage, according to the artists). A zolly shot on a 2D/3D character, though, is very challenging. Another thing that the higher-res head gave us was the ability to cast shadows on the head and pull those shadows to composite overtop of our 2D character. We’ll look at that tech- nique in the chapter on EFX.
The animation was done normally in Maya, creating a character set and setting keyframes as you are used to. Also, the twos.mel script was used to make sure that the animation was on twos. You can see a playblast of the animation of the 3D character in the file
3DLeads2D_3Danim.avi. This playblast from Maya shows the controls from the rig as well. It was a simple rig, as no deforma- tions were on the cast itself. It was debated whether or not to add them. In the end we decided that for comic effect we would try it without any deformations.
Upon completion of the 3D animation, Clint brought the ani- mation into Flash to rough out the 2D animation. Clint and Jason, the two directors of the group project, preferred creating their rough 2D animation in Flash because it is easier to set up key- frames in the timeline and adjust timing. They were not familiar
FIGURE 5.4 2D rough animation drawn in Flash.
with animating in Photoshop. They also liked working with the timelines and being able to adjust the timing of their 2D easily by moving keyframes in Flash. You can open the Flash file to see the layering used and the rough 2D animation drawn overtop of the 3D in the file Shot41-43_2DRough.fla, found in the companion data. This is the sequence animated by Clint Donaldson.
FIGURE 5.3b Jaguar McGuire’s 3D low-res head referenced into the animator’s scene.
FIGURE 5.3c Jaguar McGuire’s 3D high-res head referenced into the animator’s scene.
Not all animators in the group project were able to do both the 2D and the 3D animation. Clint and Jason both were able to, and they handled the total animation of each of their shots. The cleanup, originally, was to be handed off to our team of volunteer cleanup artists. Using the standard round brush inside of Photo- shop, they were to complete the cleanup pass of the character. However, it was found that the animators had fairly clean lines in their animation. Most of the cleanup was completed in Flash with a very small brush.