Urs_a short film by Moritz Mayerhofer

[moemayerhofer]

Hi everybody,
my name is Moritz. I recently finished my studies with a shortfilm called 'Urs'. We used 3d Character-Animation and 2d FX-Animation done mostly in TV Paint and mainly by my good friend Jan Locher.
Soon I will upload some stills and clips of the effects to the gallery - I'm new here so it probably takes a bit
If interested there's an article on the web: http://features.cgsociety.org/story_cus ... ry_id=5239


all the best, moritz
http://www.urs-film.com

[Klaus Hoefs]

Moritz and Jan (Jan, already a member here ?) your film is successful and it's hard for me to judge only by the trailer so your posting comes to me like a promo-text (sorry!).
Looking at the meat - your film is like any other 3d with 2D painted textures: it looks even more 3D than 3D used to be (of course that's o.k.). I remember the films of Nick Hilligoss (puppets//stop-motion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bl-MynjnCU) who in general has the same problem with 2D textures on 3D-real-puppets. But this techniques is much more haptic and imo has a better look and feel.

Anyway- you said at some forum (Messiah) that your next film should be more bright and more radical ? <-Can you explain it ?

[moemayerhofer]

Hi Klaus,
'Urs' will be on some festivals in germany this fall, so maybe you get the chance to see it somewhere.
3d-2d mixtures are difficult to make. Depending on the style you want to achieve there are several ways to do that. Our way was to use painted textures in combination with a shader who uses different textures for the shadow-areas and the lit areas. With that shader we tried to adapt certain aspects of the painted backgrounds: less detailed shadow-parts, stroked highlights and a more saturated line inbetween shadows and light. Besides that we tried to roughen up the edges if the 3d-elements. I wish I had a bit more time for that because it's not intense as I wanted this to be. There are shots that work better and shots that work less.

The reason why it looks 'so 3d' is the volume of the 3d-object and it always stays on model. Drawings have this freedom and imperfection which I really like. To get imperfection in the 'perfect-mathematical-calculating' 3d is hard.

'Urs' is a very classical film. It has it's actors, camera, lights, sets. One shot after the other, etc. I liked to do that. But for the next film I want to break that up: Cameraangles, Splitscreens, Transformations, Transitions, the linear timeline, points of view, etc... There are already many films out there which are so fantastic and get more out of Animation. I want to try that (by saying 'more radical').

Thanks for the Links! I really liked your drawings. The stop-motion was very well done. As it was created with actual puppets it's obvious that it's more haptic than anything out of the computer - and I'm happy about that. I think in the end it's the story that you have to believe. The technique can be elaborated and fancy, but it shouldn't end in itself - I hope that 'Urs' is more than the images.
Thanks for the feedback!

[Fabrice]

Hi Moritz,

Please can you tell us more about how you have used TVP Animation ?

[moemayerhofer]

Hi Fabrice,
sorry for this late reply. I've searched this page sometimes but it was offline. So I didn't check it again... till now.

To answer your question: We used TV Paint for Effects Animation as they combined most advantages I had in mind.
First of all the style. When you draw the fx you can decide all of it's design. The movement and shapes can be controlled as the artist wishes them to be. I'm not the biggest fan of simulated effects as you deal so much with the technical aspects. You try to make the simulation work and forget about the fx-design. At least this is my experience. Another point is that simulation is based on real life physics. That means that they normally look photoreal. The look of the film should be stylized, but still believable.

Many Effects in 'Urs' are breath and fire. In order to be efficient we created a Library of breath-clouds. They didn't have interactions with the 3d-Characters.
For some interactions we've put the 3d-blocking as an image-sequence in the background-layer of TV-Paint and then did rough animation of the fire/breath.
To get the best result we worked back and forth - 3d-blocking (with blocked 3d flame-object) -> 2d fx"poses" -> simple compositing (does it work together) -> finetuning 3d & 2d -> comp update -> coloring of 2d -> compositing

I think it's not possible to avoid this feedback-process.
There will be a work-in-progress sequence of one of the fire scenes in the Gallery which shows the steps we did.

Hope this post is not too late now thanks for the question,
Moritz

[Fabrice]

Hope this post is not too late now thanks for the question,

It's never too late.

Thanks so much for your workflow explanations. TVP Animation is very versatile and I was really curious to understand its use inside the Urs animation.
I have seen the images you have sent to Elodie, we will add them in the next coming gallery update.

(nb : for some reasons, the gallery update was delayed, apologize to everybody ...)

[Peter Wassink]

Urs was selected for the Oscar short animation shortlist.
congratz Moritz!

[Elodie]

Yes ! great news !
Madagascar was also selected

But we cross our fingers for you, Moritz ! ^^