Nov 25, 2016

New Pioneers" to Revolutionize CG TV Animation with a Novel Rigging Approach [w/video

Bit Films' former Pixar and Rhythm & Fuse man Chris Perry has produced a pitch for a new episodic TV series and partnered with animation software production specialist Anzovin Studio on a new rigging system.

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The New Pioneers is a giant electric The show is set in a future Earth where humans live inside a dome. See the pitch below and a behind-the-scenes video of the rigging and animation toolset further down this page.

Perry, who won a 2014 Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Technical Achievement Award for his work on Rhythm & Hues' Voodoo animation system, told Cartoon Brew at the VIEW conference in Italy that The New Pioneers is a series that adults series that he hopes adults will watch with their children.

"I think there is a lot of fragmentation in animation," Perry said. 'There are a lot of shows out there that are geared toward kids. But there are also animated films that I love to watch with my kids, like "Avatar: The Last Airbender," "Over the Garden Wall," and the Ghibli films. So I was wondering why there aren't more of those."

Perry founded Bit Films, a Massachusetts-based independent production studio, several years ago to launch TV and film projects. However, as an indie, he realized that for Bit Films to break into episodic productions, it needed to produce visually stunning, quirky, and affordable films.

So he contacted Raf Anzovin of Anzovin Studios. 'He and I had been wanting to make stylized animation for years. He had done a lot of animation for commercials and finally realized that he had a project that he could use for testing."

To create the computer animations, Perry says Anzovin developed a new approach to posing 3D characters. As a result, poses are more gestural, and animators no longer need to move rigid hierarchies of joints and bones.

Behind the character is a rigging tool that Anzovin wrote as a Maya plug-in (as seen in the video above). "At its core, it's a spline deformer as opposed to some kind of linear deformer," says Perry, and Raf also incorporated the "free rigging" idea first reported in Chicken Little in 2005. There is no hierarchy of nodes; you can move the character by grabbing and moving anything."

The idea was to provide animators with a puppet based on wires rather than joints and hinges. The intended benefit is to avoid the complexity that occurs in a typical animation pipeline. Characters are rigged for specific poses, but must be returned to rigging to adjust when different requirements become necessary during animation.

"We provide a simple interface for selecting nodes, and animators create temporary rigs as needed with the push of a button to accomplish what they want to accomplish," says Perry.

"They just have to remember which nodes to move, so there is a lot of room for improvisation and very short start-up times."

This rig setup was used to animate the New Pioneers' pitch piece. Although it is not currently available for sale, the feedback received is encouraging. I thought about knocking on the doors of some of the bigger studios," he said, "but ultimately I want to grow my audience and my fan base. If people like it, I expect work to come in using the same style and tools."