Rodeo FX Animation Department: How to Make a Dragon Fly

OSCAR CARAMBANO MACIAS: Welcome to this session. My name is Oscar Carambano and I'm an animation supervisor at Rodeo FX, and I had the privilege of working with my team on the creation of some memorable character performances for the season two of House of the Dragon.

I'm glad that you join me in the work process from receiving the briefing to delivering the final result. You will discover the analysis and methodology that helped our team create great dragons animations efficiently and in record time. Let's take a look to the main learning points.

So first of all, analysis of client briefing. The first part of this session is about translation. Yes. As an animation supervisor, we can translate the client request, artistic choices and et cetera, to our file. Technically and artistically we need to translate those needs. Then we will buckle down to animate.

I'm going to explain the artistic process to bring nice flying cycles into our wyverns, and then how to stop them to be reused. The third point is very important part of our workflow. I want to invite you to use the over efficiently to combine animations. Last learning point is an extra bonus. We will take a look to a different type of layer that allows you to add extra detail into your animations, all combined to create very rich performances.

OK, so let's have a look to our sample in thinking when we face a new shop. So during the first stages in a show, it is really important in animation department to set up our three pillars. Scope, depth, collaboration and tools. [? Very ?] precise numbers, sequences, shots, amount of acid, et cetera, and briefing it [? would be ?] fundamental.

The second element that is crucial is the interaction with other departments. Animation is not an isolated entity. From the beginning, in the creation of assets, we have to be present to give input about how we want to build those creators. We will discuss about it. Based on our analysis, we could prepare the tools to help the team to animate efficiently. In this case study, we will see how animation layers were the best choice.

All right. Of course, everybody in this industry understand that the contact with our client needs to be fluent and constant. And that was the case with [? Daddy ?] Anderson, the VFX supervisor client side, and Martin Pelletier, the VFX supervisor in house. From the beginning, [? Daddy, ?] with a big experience in animation, was generous in information and briefing. He gave us a nice vision about the scale of those creatures, the pace, the personality. In parallel production team prepared the numbers.

And here we go. With around 150 shots to be delivered by Rodeo FX, 72 concerned character animation. HBO delivered a very early pre-visualization of sequences allowing us to understand the action to be generated. Those [? previz ?] were well detailed with the asset to be animated, and the main action was described. We ended [? soar ?] [? to soar ?] shots by flying, standing and others. Getting that, we see that more than 70% of shots were about to get our dragons flying into real environment and connecting with real footage of actors riding them.

A 20% shot with the standing wyverns that was specific to a sequence with [? Silverwind ?] in a cave. And then a few shots about ravens flying and some seagulls in the coast scenes. These numbers are there to point that we will need to focus mainly in to find a good workflow to produce flying animations. We want it to be fast in blocking and accurate in the details.

So the next step for us will be to understand the creators in order to build the assets. Let me give you a brief idea about our research. So before to touch anything in animation, we spend our early stage in research for reference. What could be helpful to keep those creatures believable? So we went into nature documentaries to find animals, behaviors, and mechanics that could match our fantastic creatures.

Of course, but as the first animal that came up to the list. I had the opportunity in my past to visit the north of Australia, the Kakadu park, where I saw those big flying fox. The wingspan of those creatures, the anatomy, which is clearly different to birds. Everything in those creatures was useful to build our animations, but also other reptiles like varanus, Komodo dragons, helping us with some ideas for tails and limbs. Even storks are interesting in term of neck, too.

Getting a close look to the anatomy of bats we found that we wanted to give focus to the upper body, shoulders and arms. The idea was to get poses for soaring and flying actions that could be anatomically possible. Here is an excellent illustration of [? Furial ?] 666 where he translates those ideas into a vibrant shape. As a last element to complete the research, we created a chart of nomenclature.

When you work with animated creatures, it is highly recommended to create a map of names. This is going to be a perfect way to improve communication with your team and other departments. Also clients, of course. So OK. That was the fun part of the process. We really enjoyed to investigate about the creatures, and also we were prepared to discuss with modelers, riggers and TDs in every single aspect of the asset.

So we created a flow of meetings where all the departments involved in those assets were present to discuss strategies. From the beginning, we asked a modeler to sculpt a skeleton and a system of muscles to be used in [? surface ?] stages, so animation could be sure that the motion would be deforming properly. Every single part of those bodies.

Clavicle, tendons, shoulder muscles. The idea was, to be precise there, since we had some pretty close close-ups. Riggers compose a setup based in the animation request to manipulate the characters. We asked for a system of trajectory allowing us to get those characters through a path and getting control on a speed. Speed that was a precise requirement from the clients, giving us the average of the speed to keep consistent the fly through the different sequences.

All right. That was a brief idea of how we analyze the show and prepare the assets in order to face the world for shot consistently. Now, let's have a look to the process of animation and how the ledgers had an important place in our workflow. When we talk about a solid workflow, it is not necessary to be complicated. A solid workflow could be a sample method, a method of work, or that all the animators are using in the same way, so everybody will get the same results.

Also, Maya from Autodesk is a flexible server so you can modify your tools and adapt them to your needs. In our case, the focus was on a proposed system to stop [? drop ?] animations, be able to [? reuse. ?] through the scenes, combine them, and modify them to reach those performances. Let's take a look to the process.

There is a few tips that we always recommend to our artists before to start to manipulate controllers. Identify a good video reference to guide you. We were working with realistic moves, so to be guided by real footage will give you extra information about main actions and also details. And if you can, try to find reference from different angles to understand well the mechanics.

Also work in different angles to be accurate in space. And a fractal process animating main parts and adding secondary elements later. This is a base, a base, but it's always important to remind it. Dragons flying with such a long neck need to be lead by head, like storks or flamingos. Then chest will participate in the motion, and the hips and legs will be more loose. Tail is going to be used to balance the motion.

Our system of path allow us to get detail in the flow and then we could add variations later with the layers. So after to go through this process of keyframing animation, let's do a next step. We are going to stock our animations. For that you could use different techniques. External tools. But Maya has by default the animation transfer object model named ATOM. This is a very simple method to save the data of your controllers.

So selecting [? your ?] animated three, you will be able to [? spore ?] it into a file ATOM. As you can see have many, many options. You have many options here. You could [? spore ?] bake an animation. You could [? spore ?] animation layers. You can create a template to for big amount of [? spore ?] files. Also, you can [? spore ?] on a specific range of frames, for instance.

In this case, we supported a sewing cycle and a flapping or flying cycle. This is a way to create your animation library and it could be useful not only for body animation. You can stock your facial expressions, poses, et. All right, let's go with what we find really powerful in Maya animation layers.

By default, our animations are in a base layer, not visible when you open the animator panel. As soon as you create the first layer, you will see appear the base animation layer plus the new one on top. So you will keep your first animation and in the new layer you could add extra animation that is going to add on top. This is because the layer are by default in additive mode.

OK, so which is really powerful is these two other modes. Override and passthrough. Override mode is going to show only this animation and not the lower layers. And OK, it sounds like a weird. I want to combine layers, not to clip them. OK? Here is what I love on this system. The weight value.

For instance, here is an animation with several layers. We have the soaring layer, and on top, we have the flying layer. This flying layer is an override mode. So we can see exclusively the flying, right? But now we want it to blend with the soaring. All right?

So for that to combine both when you select the layer below the panel, we find the value weight, which is animatable with a slider or with numbers. Moving into timeslide you can set up keys of weight, deciding the intensity of this animation on top of the previous one. So if I'm going to zero value, you will see only the soaring. If I'm going to 0.5, I'm going to have 50% of each other.

All right, so. Let's see a useful way. What is great is that you can start your animation at 0 value. OK, getting the story. An increase in time the weight to end in a flap action. You can combine those to get accurate actions and everything with a quick manipulation of one curve. Is it not beautiful? So as you can see, animation library combined with the layering workflow is a perfect combination to reuse, blend and detail performances.

And as a last tip I would like to give you a last trick in animation. Very useful. The additive layers. Whilst you have to create flying choreography, probably you want to add variations, you want to add accidents or micro details. For that, my advice is to create a specific ledgers for those sections. So for instance, head, neck shape, or leg paddling. For that you select those specific controllers and you create a layer and you keep it in additive mode.

So it's going to be on top of the rest of the layers combining with. It is really powerful because you are able to modify those layers to remove it, to reduce the influence again with the weight value. It is a non-destructive process, giving you full control to address client nodes, requests in a very fast pace. This is definitely the tool in anime, no doubt.

All right. And now it's time to say thank you for watching this case study master class. I hope all those tips will help you to improve your workflow, but especially to enjoy the animation process as much as we enjoy to do in House of the Dragon season two. Have a nice day.