THE MAKING OF
How Foundation Imaging creates a 30 minute live-action show, all in 3D, every week.   By Erik Holsinger

PART 1    PART 2    PART 3    PART 4    PART 5

Bug Bomb Run:
2.1 Mbyte Quicktime 4 Movie
Click on the image to see this scene from Starship Troopers

Emmy-award winning animator and Foundation Imaging co-founder Ron Thornton is the CGI Producer for Starship Troopers. Click on the image for Ron's bio.

That Fabulous Face
W hile realistic character movement is good, according to Scheetz creating great facial animation is the companies main priority in the series. "The trick to making the character work is the facial animation - that's the part that everyone is looking at, so that's the part [of the animation] that has to be perfect." The character lip sync and facial expressions are all key framed in Lightwave using Morph Gizmo."Using Morph Gizmo and other tools with Lightwave allows us to use about a hundred morph targets per character," said Scheetz. "We can select which expression to use on which frame, and then enter that information in by hand."

The decisions on what keyframe to use and when to use that morph target can come from a number of different sources, from timing sheets, or a utitlity program for Lightwave called Magpie Pro. The animators at Foundation also have more traditional analog approach to working out the lip sync - video. "We have a system setup where we can video tape ourselves lip syncing with the dialog and use that as a visual reference for the animation," said Scheetz. This low tech solution comes after extensive research showed that the latest technology wasn't the best production solution. "We found that all of the cool dots on the face, interpolating algorithms that can supposedly track your emotions don't work for us," said Bryant." You spend so much time cleaning it up and so much time correcting it, that you might as well have just done it by hand in the first place - and usually the hand cranked approach gives you better results."

Challenges, and a Bright Future
So what is the biggest challenge in working on Starship Troopers? "Just the size, the sheer unadulterated size of the project," said Bryant. "It is a massive undertaking at every level - from finding all the crew to building the technology to render the show." For Scheetz, the challenge is more immediate. "Trying to get the animation done on time is our biggest challenge," said a tired Scheetz. "Time is definitely our biggest enemy."

Part of this time crunch is due to the standards that Bryant, Scheetz and all the crew at Foundation Imaging set for themselves. "Foundation Imaging is not about to produce crap," said Bryant. "We don't have multiple quality levels - it's actually a limitation of the company in that we only have one quality level. So we knew that it was not going to be easy, because we weren't going to make it easy on ourselves."

What will the future hold - can one team create a full show in just a week? "That's just blindingly fast," Scheetz says with a weary sigh. "We have four teams doing four shows in four weeks, but to have a single team create a show in just a week is too much. We've even talked about what if we rolled the entire company into one big Mega-team, but then quality control and continuity would suffer." For Bryant, the challenges are well worth the effort, as Foundation is breaking new ground with the show. "[Troopers] is not a cartoon show - it's virtual film making. It's a live action show that is just entirely computer generated - or rather animator generated, said Bryant. "After all, the computers are just the machines that generate motion between keyframes. Its the animators that make the difference."

Erik Holsinger has been writing about digital media production so long he remembers a time when 1 Mbyte of RAM was an impressive thing. You can reach him at eholsinger@digitalmedianet.com