Ways To Keep CG Characters Alive On Screen

Ways To Keep CG Characters Alive On Screen

CG or Computer Generated characters are widely used today in Movies, Short Films, Video Games or Advertisements.

Readers, in this blog we will tell you how an animator can keep CG Characters alive on screen.

Movies like Terminator, How to train your dragon, Avatar, Lord of Rings and many more projected CG characters.

CG Characters were so alive in these movies that audience believed them as real characters.

Animators need to craft the CG characters properly to make them convincing for the audience.

As CG Characters are computer generated figures hence they should get proper movement and expressions to look alive.

A still CG character will look dull or boring on the screen.

CG characters lose their life if they stop moving completely in the mid of the scene or in the end of the scene.

Digital characters need to stay alive whether through movement or breathing.

You can keep the digital characters alive only by showing the process of breathing.

The digital puppet has no life in them and they will die if not animated.

Job of a good animator is to keep them moving or giving the illusion that the character is living.

To achieve this it is necessary to set key-frames at the start and end of the shot.

In case of 2D animation adding a blink to the eyes is enough to show that the character is alive.

But in case of 3D the illusion of life ends when the character stops moving.

A 3D CG character portrays a three dimensional body which looks very similar to real creature.

Rules To Keep CG characters Alive

Begin with a proper planning, study real life character and read the psychology of movement.

Observe people, the way they interact and how they express themselves.

Plan out the animation, usually the novice animators don’t ponder upon the facial expressions.

Without proper facial expressions the animation will be lifeless and flat.

Most commonly junior animators work on the body poses first rather than the facial part.

But the facial part should be handled from the beginning.

Characters thought and feeling need to be conveyed and it should be planned at the very start.

In the film Avengers: Infinity War lot of focus, screen time and empathy was given to the film’s antagonist Thanos.

In Avengers: Infinity War the makers were aware from the beginning that if the character did not work, the film would not work also.

As a result the director involved Digital Domain four month before the shoot to do huge testing and development for 40 minutes of Thanos on screen.

Josh Brolin played Thanos in this movie.

Along with motion capture the animation team also relied on matching Josh Brolin’s body performance with the digital Thanos.

Josh Brolin and other actors wore helmet cameras rigs for the facial expressions.

To handle facial animation Digital Domain used in-house Masquerade and Direct Drive software tools.

Masquerade allows us to capture facial performances with more flexibility and fewer limitations.

During motion capture, the actor wear a motion capture suit with a helmetmounted camera system and perform live on set.

Mo-cap helps in body and facial capture both.

The image maker dots on the face of the actor were used to produce a fairly smooth or low frequency mesh.

Later on these meshes were enhanced with more details to produce high resolution final output.

Disney Research Zurich is well established for facial reconstruction and animation in the world.

Studios like Digital Domain and ILM is attached to them.

Weta Digital’s visual effect supervisor Joe Letteri is one of the artists who brought fantastic characters to life with the most realistic performances in

the films like War for the Planet of the Apes, The Lord of Rings and many others.

The Jungle Book is another such film where CG characters came to alive on the screen.

Think of Baloo (the bear), Black Panther (Bagheera) and King Louie.

All these CG characters came alive on the screen with their fabulous body language.

Animating giant ape King Louie was a challenge for the animators of Weta Digital.

Moving Picture Company created new software for animating muscular structure in the animals.

Animators used real footage of animal movement along with Mo-Cap. For King Louie actor Christopher Walken’s wrinkles and folds were integrated into animated character.

In all the above mentioned CG characters of the movies, characters were given movement from the beginning to the end.

In fact The Jungle Book characters portrayed well defined emotions to convince the audience enough.

To work on CG character animators need to do ‘blocking’.

‘Blocking’ means the process of initiating the main key poses in a shot using steeped curves to test whether the shot is going to work or not.

Key Poses are the main poses of the character, how the character will move or react.

Once the key poses are finalised the animator then fills the in-between frames.

In big studios like Disney or Pixar an animator get one or two days to block out their work before showing it to the director.

Whereas in Television, animators get an hour to block out a shot in tighter deadlines.

The key poses should include character’s facial expressions to convey emotions.

While working on Maya create a Face Camera.

Keep the rig simple while animating in 3D. The good rig will allow the animator to animate while the bad rig will add workload.

Without a good facial expression into the animated character, the audience won’t connect themselves to the character.

Hence from the above it is clear that to keep the CG character alive on screen, the animators have to work on face more accurately.

Even a blink of the eye or a smile or a frown can make the CG character alive on the screen.

So, remember to give any expression to the CG character from the beginning to the end rather than making them lifeless.

Here we conclude our discussion; if you have any query regarding this topic, then don’t hesitate to contact us.