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BlastOff! A 3D Animated Short
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Bringing Pixels to Life with 3D Character Animation for
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BlastOff! is a pilot for a 3D animated web series where each night when a child goes to bed, his toy alien comes to life and flies through various space adventures while the child sleeps in his BlastOff! Bed. This 3-minute pilot webisode shows the BlastOff! Bed being constructed and its maiden voyage. The BlastOff! pilot was intended as a test project where I could exercise and refine the skills necessary to produce a 3D animated short film, from concept to completion. I especially wanted to focus on many aspects of 3D character animation and build a viable 3D animation pipeline and in-house render farm at the DreamLight studio in preparation of launching the new 3D animated series of BlastOff! shorts. The latest progress on the BlastOff! series can be seen on the Autiton Archives™ Work-in-progress Web log. This new DreamLight 3D animation pipeline and in-house render farm could then also be used on a variety of DreamLight’s commercial 3D projects for CD-ROM, DVD, the Web, digital video, TV and Film. Note: High res. versions of the images & videos are available on the BlastOff! Special Edition DVD.
To keep the overall production time on BlastOff! as short as possible I decided to base the film on work that I had already done in the past. The vehicle of the film is made from the 3D model that I had already created when I designed and built the real BlastOff! Bed. For the main character of the film, I chose Digit, a little green alien 3D character that I had designed back in 1995 for KeyQuest, an award-winning 3D interactive edutainment CD-ROM that DreamLight created and produced.
I had originally designed and sketched the 3D character Digit in Fractal Painter, modeled it in Macromedia Extreme 3D and rendered it in Strata Studio Pro & Electric Image Animation System back in 1995. At that time 3D character animation was rather limited on desktop computers, so I designed the original character to be animated as a collection of rigid intersecting components. Character animation technology has come a long way since then with technologies like subpatch and subdivision surface modeling, bone deformations and morph mixing. In order to take advantage of this current technology I decided to first rebuild the character using more modern 3D software. 
Since I already had a version of the model in auto·des·sys form·Z, I was able to export all the parts as individual object files and import them into modo to use as a template to build a more modern version of the character model. Above you can see the original Extreme 3D model imported into modo 1.0.3 to be rebuilt. Each separate object has been given a different shade so you can see how the original model was built as completely separate intersecting pieces. Using the original model as a guide, I rebuilt the entire 3D character as a single subpatched mesh by hand, point by point and polygon by polygon. This new seamless mesh could then be deformed and animated more effectively using modern technologies like bones and morphs in LightWave 3D.
I then brought the 3D character model into LightWave 3D 9.0 where I detailed it with textures and rigged it for animation. Rigging a 3D character is the process of adding a skeleton of bones, position morphs and additional goal and target controls to facilitate the animation process. Once a 3D character is rigged, it can be animated using inverse kinematics, also know as IK. IK allows you to animate a 3D character much like a puppet. Animating a set of controls and targets indirectly animates the underlying bone skeleton which then deforms and animates the character’s actual 3D subpatched mesh. Below you can see the Digit 3D character with its full rig visible. The yellow shapes are the bones and the red shapes are the goal and target nulls used to animate the character. The list to the right of the character is a hierarchical list of the many bones in the 3D character’s skeleton.
Once I had the 3D character fully rigged and ready to animate I added it to the LightWave scene that contained the set and props of the room. I used dual monitors (A 23" Apple Cinema Display HD and a 17" Sony LCD) on a dual processor Power Mac G5 workstation to enable me to spread out all the panels necessary to animate the character efficiently. Below is a snapshot of my workspace with all the panels open that I used to animate the character. At the top left you can see the Scene Editor’s Dope Sheet which is used to refine the animation key frames to adjust the animation timing. At the bottom left you can see the Graph Editor which is used to adjust the animation curves that control the acceleration, deceleration and velocity of motion. On the right monitor you can see the four view ports that I used to see the animation as I worked on it [Camera, Top, Right & Back (which is really Front in LW ;-)]. At the top right is the object properties panel for various adjustments and at the bottom right is the Morph Mixer that I used to do all the facial animation for the 3D character.
Another 3D character animation technique that I wanted to exercise in the making of BlastOff! is morph mixing. This is a powerful technology that can be used particularly well for facial animation including lip sync animation. In order to keep the overall production time down on this particular short I decided against using full lip sync and instead used morph mixing to animate the 3D characters facial expressions. Morph mixing is done by first creating a set of poses in the 3D character model using morph maps. A morph map is effectively a set of alternate x,y,z coordinates for each point in the 3D character’s subpatched mesh. In LightWave 3D the Morph Mixer can then be used to dial in varying amounts of each pose and mix them together to animate the 3D character’s face. In the below video I am simply testing some of the key morph maps, then at the end I create a facial expression by mixing various morphs together. Notice on the Morph Mixer panel that I’ve created sets of morphs that include a bilateral morph as well as separate morphs for the right and left sides. This enables greater flexibility when animating facial expressions.
Below is a snapshot of my workspace set up to animate the facial expressions of the 3D character. Again I make full use of dual monitors to work simultaneously with the Scene Editor, Graph Editor, four 3D view ports, properties panel and of course the Morph Mixer.
Whether you are simply interested in seeing how I made BlastOff! or you would like to make your own 3D animation, the BlastOff! Special Edition DVD includes a DVD resolution version of my award-winning 3D animated short film, BlastOff!, three additional versions of BlastOff! with behind the scenes commentaries, high resolution versions of all the images and videos on this page, a collection of set and prop LightWave files, additional behind the scenes content and more.
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