In your opinion: Integrated or Separated? :)

Integrated is by far the best way to be in my opinion. Both Maya and XSI work really well like this. Switching between applications is not good anymore. Being able to animate modelling tools can be very useful.

What's ef9? I know it's your website and everything, but why ef9?

Sad but true, ef9 is the key you press when rendering in LW. LOL. When I set the site up ages ago I couldn’t think of a name. Its easy to type! ;-)

(DivX - 4.87 MB)

Tell us about the plug-ins you write yourself?

The plug-ins I write come directly from the problems my colleagues and I encounter in production. This makes some of them useful to the general public, others are just too specific. Point Oven is a good example of production influencing development. We drastically needed to improve our pipeline between applications and Point Oven is the commercial result of the custom tools and ideas I have encountered at Passion.

From an arts background, how did you get into programming (TD and plug-ins)

No idea what so ever. I’ve only been coding a year or so, never touched it before. The drive to learn how to do it came from working at Passion. I think that I got into expression writing a lot for character rigs, and I just progressed from there.

Will LineFX ever be made available?

LineFX is a different baby to Point Oven. LineFX falls into the category of task-specific code. It does do some cool line rendering, and it has become a lot more useable. The problem is that it needs to be very flexible and user friendly to fit into general production and I’m not sure I want to put all the effort needed to get it out into the open. The other influencing factor to LineFX release is that I know I can do it better now. Looking at Final Toon and Tomcat I think a commercial NPR tool for LW has to be better than LineFX. I did however get a great response from the LW community so I will try and get a LineFX release out there in the near future.

How long did the work on the Offspring video for "Hit That" take?

The CG started slowly with only one guy modeling the heads, and another doing the lip sync for the entire track. This was spread over about two weeks. We then had about another two weeks to complete the 40 or so shots, so the team grew significantly to complete it. We finally finished on December 12th last year.

(DivX - 12.6 MB)

Why did you only have to animate the eyes and mouth? I understand they made masks for the rest of the head? Would it not have been easier to replace the whole head?

Yeah probably. The problem was a small budget and a very busy CG team. The idea was to try and do as little CG on the job as possible. Of course it didn’t work out like that, and luckily for the Offspring production, a major job that the Passion CG team were working on got postponed, this allowed us to make the Offspring team big enough to complete all the shots. If that hadn’t happened it would have been a lot of late nights.

One of the big problems with the project was the tracking. Boujou isn’t designed to track objects onto moving objects, its designed to track objects into moving cameras. So to achieve the track we had to cheat a lot. Amazingly enough it worked.