Mad World the graduation animated film by Levii Levemmetry telling a story of a maligned, confused irregular bobby. He is not dealing well with his colleagues with their granny hustling powder poofers. He takes a oblique turn into a sub conscious roller coasting dream world along with his sardonic host King Commercial who sets about straightening Herbert out with a tour of commercial contempt, misanthropy and wrapping up with a spot of bunny bashing.
Planning
Wilson joined the project quite accidentally when on a visit to production design he noticed the Eva Kunst’s gothic shadow stretching designs for Mad World : I asked to look at some render tests and to my surprise the texturing and lighting was yet to even begin and only Levii to do everything with three and a half months to the graduation screenings! I offered to help with the 3D texturing/lighting/rendering using SoftImage. This soon consumed all of my days….and latterly nights!
Texturing
The base textures were sourced from a variety of hand painted tiles edited using Photoshop/zBrush building a materials library from which the scenes could be textured. Basic UV mapping had to be created for many of the architectural and also few of the higher detailed maps like the tanks.
Painted tile base Painted title variation
This was the general strategy that we applied to most of the scenes, which meant we maintained momentum and consistency.
There were the repetitive tasks like re-appliance of textures and UV’s for protagonist models since the project was passed around the globe with modeller’s animators (Levii was 99% of all animation) This meant due to the time squeeze some inconsistencies are somewhat inevitable (mostly noticeable to us!)
Lighting
A simple diffuse/specular lighting approach with the key light (sun) with blue shade fills and rim lights. There were many variations on this basic formula since the scene themselves varied from small rooms to entire cityscapes!
Rendering
The project was rendered SD PAL using the Mentalray rendering engine. When the camera was locked a single background frame was rendered. Animation could be composited with embedded alpha channels to reveal the background in cases where the animation passes behind static foreground objects. Generally rendering constituted the following layers:
Diffuse – Flat colour shading
Ambient
Ambient lighting
Highlight – Specular highlights
Ambient Occlusion – Also known as the ‘Dirt Map’ shader by Daniel Rind, which produces the effect of light occlusion in the corners and creases of geometry.
Shadow
Diffuse Pass Ambient Light
Highlight Pass
Occlusion Pass
Compositing
Pedro and Rodrigo worked full time compositing the shots using Combustion working with the above layers as the basis.
One of the advantage of rendering diferent passes is a bigger flexibility and more control during the compositing process. We could easily adjust the way the different passes interacted with each other ; the color or brightness of a particular element or apply a motion blur to a specific element in the scene.
Square of rabbits
King Commercial
Herbert man at work
In some shots it was needed to track 2d lights to an element of the scene ( ex. a car ) These kind of effect may become to visible and make the shot look fake. Again , having these effects in a separate layer gave us more control to adjust , diminish or even turn them off later.
Other tasks included to add and animate 2d skies to all the exterior shots ; to insert particles in some shots using the particle system of Combustion and to color grade the shots to keep their continuity .
Mad World - excerpt
Credits
DIRECTOR : Levii Levemmetry
DESIGN: Eva Kunst:
3D TEXTURING: Wilson Stockman
COMPOSITING: Pedro Pinto, Rodrigo Fernandes, Wilson Stockman
