Hey Bulldog: Canine Face Replacement on Garfield 2

How Rainmaker Dealt With a Jowly Character in CG

By Bryant Frazer

June 22, 2006    Source: Film & Video

Winston the bulldog turned out to be a real tough character, at least as far as his animation was concerned. For talking-cat sequel Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, a VFX team at Rainmaker in Vancouver had to put a phony face on a live bulldog and have the results look photoreal.

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“We were all excited at the beginning because Winston didn’t have long fur,” which is notoriously difficult to model in CG, says Charlene Eberle, visual-effects supervisor at Rainmaker. “But what we didn’t take into account was that he was a bulldog, and [his face was] made of many different folds. He’s a difficult animal. He’s got jowls and things that hang when he smiles and pants. It’s not just getting those details, but getting those details to work as he’s speaking. So he was a challenge to get locked down from the very beginning.”

Eberle wasn’t a complete newbie to this kind of work. (She was an on-set coordinator for Cats and Dogs and also did muzzle replacement for the straight-to-video Doctor Dolittle 3.) And some techniques that were developed by CG supervisor Nicholas Boughen for the first Garfield were carried over to this one. But a major problem on Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties was that a technique that worked for one shot wouldn’t work for another because Winston looked so different depending on how he was photographed. “You can’t use the same model on the second shot that you did on the first — maybe he was hot that day and really panting,” Eberle explains. “So we had to manipulate the model on a shot-by-shot basis, and make sure it was the same character every time.”

To lay the groundwork, Rainmaker’s team went out to the set and spent a day doing 3D scans of each animal they needed to animate in post. Those scans are used by the modeling department to build rough wireframe models that are used by the match-movers. At the same time, a greyscale model of the animal’s face is being made, which the animators will use to manipulate the shot. Incomplete versions of the animation were approved by the film’s director, Tim Hill, and its animation supervisor, Chris Bailey, before being finalized and composited.

To make it all happen, Rainmaker used some proprietary software in addition to Newtek LightWave 3D 8.5, Eyeon Fusion 4, Worley Laboratories Sasquatch and Fprime, Iridas Framecycler and 2d3 Boujou 3.

“Once we got details of the anatomy and face locked down, we hit the ground running,” says Eberle, noting that Rainmaker finished 180 shots in eight weeks. The team worked on some other animals besides Winston, which presented their own creative problems. A constant issue throughout the process was surmounting the technical challenges of making the creatures appear to talk while still remaining faithful to their individual characters.

“Most of the animals were great — we worked on a ferret and a parrot — but we had a jackrabbit who was not your store-bought, fluffy bunny. He was very angular. At any given point they would switch the camera angle, and he would prove a little bit more problematic. As human beings, we try to add a little more fluff to an animal, because we have it imprinted on our brain what the animal should look like, so we kept having to give him a face-shaving and make him a little more angular — and at the same time make him talk.”