A 2D Toon Takes A 3D Ride
 
Blur Studio turns SpongeBob SquarePants as an animated 3D character with Morph-O-Matic

When you’re one of the best visual effects shops in town, you usually get some big clients knocking at your door. Blur Studios, based in Venice California, has definitely earned its reputation from the quality of its work and the dedication of its artists, and the knock on the door came last year from Paramount Parks and Nickelodeon when they approached Blur with the idea of producing “a stereoscopic, computer-animated ride film based on the wildly popular Nickelodeon cartoon series SpongeBob SquarePants” according to Sherry Wallace, Blur’s Producer for the project.  The 4 and a half minute ride make its debut at Paramount Parks Theme Parks across North America two years ago and is now projected across globe at many Theme Parks.

Of course, on a job this big, there were significant hurdles to overcome. First and foremost, Blur was given the daunting task of taking the original 2D elements and converting them into 3D while not losing the originals’ quality. Add to that the fact that they had 15 unique characters to model and animate, including six who had speaking parts. Blur’s CG Supervisor Paul Taylor recalls, “For the characters who had dialogue, we had to use morph targets for all the facial lip-syncing.”

Blur immediately began to look at tools that could help increase their productivity, and Morph-O-Matic soon came to their attention. As Sze Chan, one of Blur’s modelers and character riggers who worked on the project knew, “Without a tool like Morph-O-Matic, we would have had to transfer animation for each channel inside of Track View.” Instead, Blur was able to do things not previously possible with the built-in tools and in far less time. And on such a massive project, time was critical. Fortunately, both Chan and Taylor agreed that the product had “No learning curve”, and that they were up and running in less than a day. That was also especially important for Blur’s Lead Character Animator, Marlon Now. “Morph-O-Matic provided a faster solution with more possibilities, a better interface, and nice floaters with sliders,” he said, “You need smooth playback while animating facial animation and Morph-O-Matic provided it.”

And Chan echoed his workmate’s sentiments on the ease of use, “Beyond the number of channels that Morph-O-Matic could display at once, the other nice feature was its capability to open multiple floaters for different characters and animate them all at once.” This saved the Blur team lots of unneeded aggravation and let them focus on the task of producing stunning character output for Paramount Parks.

Now summed up his experiences with Morph-O-Matic on the SpongeBob SquarePants ride pretty simply, “It’s faster and smoother than any other existing morphing solution for 3ds max.” concludes Marlon Now.


Download link: Watch a clip from the 4D Spongebob Ride created by Blur Studios: www.blur.com/html_quicktime/spongebob.html

Morph-O-Matic, the award winning progressive morphing plugin for 3ds max :
www.di-o-matic.com/products/Plugins/MorphOMatic/



Related Links:

Di-o-matic: www.di-o-matic.com
Blur Studios: www.blur.com