Situation

Digital Dimension is an Emmy award-winning computer-generated imagery production studio. The studio provides an end-to-end solution, from pre-production planning and design, to on-set VFX supervision, through production and post-production.

The upcoming movie Hansel & Gretel is highlighted by spectacular shots created with Facial Studio by Digital Dimension.

"We had 3 artists working on those sequences for about 3 weeks." explains Ben Girard, President of Digital Dimension. "The entire background, foreground trees, and moving leaves were all computer generated and composited, only the house and a few trees are live action elements."  The main action of those sequences revolves around a witch that require complex facial animation.

Problem/Challenges

Creating compelling animations under tight budget constraints is a fact of life for animation studios. The animation solutions required to create a special effect for a movie show must be stable and incur a minimum of operational overhead.

Digital Dimension was asked to create a witch made of smoke coming out of a chimney. "These shots called for a trail of smoke coming out of a chimney that forms into a face." says Benoit Girard. "The face then talks and scares the kids. The 'smoke witch' is then blown and pushed away by a Fairy."

"We found out that we needed to match the actress' face." explains Edmund Kozin, VP Technical Director. "We did not want to use a 3d scan of the actress' face, we wanted to have total controls over the style and the overall animation". "We did not want to lock the director to a particular style." adds Girard. " Facial studio gave us a powerful and easy way to accommodate any possible design changes. "

Solution/Benefits

Girard and his team used Facial Studio for the challenging task of reproducing the witch head coming out of a chimney. "We also used Thinking Particles from Cebas to create smoke from the head created and animated within Facial Studio." explains Kozin.

"In order for our studio to use Facial Studio, its use and learning curve had to be shorter than modeling the witch's head the conventional way." says Girard. "In fact, 10 min after installing the program, we already had created a head that resembled the actress. Facial Studio is very intuitive! We then moved onto creating morph targets for the animation using the muscles deformers built into Facial Studio."

Facial animations of the witch sequences in Hansel & Gretel have been significantly improved using muscles deformers from Facial Studio as well as other unique features. "Facial studio allowed us to create the face parametrically and rapidly." says Ben Girard.

From features that help artists to focus on creation, to powerful deformations features that enable great animation to be created in a very short amount of time, Di-O-Matic software is helping Digital Dimension modelers and animators realize amazing heads in no time. "The plethora of options that Facial Studio offers opens up so many doors and choices that we did not feel afraid of the possible changes from the post-production crew." concludes Girard.