minning.de - Stefan Minning: CG Artist and Developer

The idea for my ani­mated short film Bagel 2 was first con­ceived by my friend and col­league Matthias Koenig and myself shortly after see­ing all the news about the Euro­pean space mis­sion “Bea­gle 2″ in Decem­ber of 2003. We found it quite amus­ing that while all one ever heard of the Euro­pean Bea­gle were mes­sages of fail­ure and tragedy, the Amer­i­can mis­sion at the same time was doing a much bet­ter job.

We soon real­ized that the story could make a cute ani­mated short film and started sketch­ing out our ideas.
Sadly, Matthias dropped out of the project early on due to him work­ing on another per­sonal project.

In the begin­ning, there were sev­eral dif­fer­ent designs for the pro­tag­o­nist Bagel 2, some of which you can see sketched out below. Only a sin­gle day before the modeling-​​phase started, the look for Bagel 2 was final­ized.

The Sto­ry­board

For­tu­nately, the story itself was already roughly fixed when I started draw­ing the sto­ry­board, but now the time had come to judge for every sin­gle shot, whether
a) it was required in order to tell the story
and
b) it was pos­si­ble to imple­ment in the rel­a­tively short time­frame of about 4 months.

I was aim­ing for a two minute film, and so I added, removed, changed and swapped shots until I was happy with the story and the length.

The sto­ry­board was then scanned, cropped and inserted into Adobe Pre­miere to cre­ate an ani­matic. This can be use­ful to see if a story really works, in that it helps in tim­ing the length of shots. Also, when peo­ple ask you what you’re doing all the time, it’s always nice to have at least some­thing to show them!

Mod­el­ing

By early April, all pre-​​production work had been com­pleted and I could finally start mod­el­ling the “char­ac­ters”:

As you can prob­a­bly see, the mod­els fea­tured in Bagel 2 are rel­a­tively sim­ple, so the con­struc­tion process didn’t take too long. All ani­mate objects are mod­elled using NURBS, only the ter­rain and rocks are made of polygons .

Take a closer look at Bagel’s antenna (or tail) in the above image: In the film, there was a shim­mer­ing light where here is only a lit­tle green dot. This was done because it’s much sim­pler to add glow­ing lights in post-​​production than to ren­der them in 3D. In After Effects, all I had to do was to fil­ter out that spe­cific shade of green and apply a glow effect there, giv­ing me great con­trol over the look and inten­sity of the light.

Inter­est­ingly, one of the only stored tex­tures used in the film is the body of the Amer­i­can space ship, “Bob”. The flag and the details on him were painted in Pho­to­shop.
Most other tex­tures are cre­ated using pro­ce­dural shaders, mean­ing that they are not stored in image files but are cre­ated only through math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­las directly at render-​​time. I pre­ferred using pro­ce­du­rals because even though the orig­i­nal tex­ture for the Mar­sian land­scape was huge (around 300MB), it still wasn’t large enough for close up cam­era views.
Pro­ce­du­rals do not lose qual­ity when zoom­ing in, so they were the obvi­ous choice here.

The detail on Bagel’s tires and Bob’s thrusters are cre­ated via dis­place­ment shaders . These are applied like bump-​​maps, but with the dif­fer­ence that they actu­ally move the geom­e­try instead of just the nor­mals of the sur­face. If you look closely at the depic­tion above, you can prob­a­bly see that the tires on the left are com­pletely flat, unline those on the right.
Dis­place­ment shaders are great when you want to keep your mod­els light and still retain a high level of detail. Beware though, cer­tain ren­der­ers take much longer to ren­der dis­place­ment maps than bump maps! I ren­dered most scenes using the free RenderMan-​​compliant ren­derer 3delight, so ren­der­ing dis­place­ments wasn’t that much of a prob­lem in my case.