Animation instructors are bringing prestige to Full Sail by teaming up for competitions on industry-respected sites like CG Society.org. A team, led by Ricardo Tobon, recently won an award for their Steampunk-themed Flight of Icarus. The 15-member team joined a prestigious list of winners from all over the world for their work in the CG Society’s Steampunk Myths and Legends competition, which ran from Nov. 10 to Feb. 3.
Contestants were charged with creating a Steampunk-themed animation based on a myth or legend. Steampunk is a fantasy genre that incorporates elaborate Victorian-era design elements (think Jules Verne) with steam engine technological elements or even anachronistic technology elements (think H.G. Wells).
Team Full Sail won for the category of best sculpture, for their digital 3D visual produced using the techniques of motion capture and projection mapping. The image of a girl attempting flight with a jet pack also includes painted elements and a digitally enhanced version of a prop jet pack, built and painted by David Wolgemuth (Compositing Lead, Physical Prop Creation, Editing).
“It was a great achievement for all of us to actually be able to pull [this] off among thousands and thousands of other users and studios,” says Ricardo Tobon, who served as the project’s director and worked on the motion capture portion of the piece.
“The most impressive thing about this is that the forum is not one or two artists, it’s thousands of artists and the studios are professional studios,” he added.
For the animation, the team used motion capture to give their digital sculpture movement “so it moves like the physical person,” says Tobon. The projection mapping technique is for the final look – for the colors, lighting and textures, he explained. This technique lends photorealism to the animation by projecting the actor’s face and body onto the model, where it can then be manipulated and made to do things (like fly through the air) that are too complicated or expensive to recreate in other ways.
Tobon says that participating in competitions like this is extremely valuable to the staff members who are stretching their skills and to students, who benefit from the knowledge gained by their instructors. The work of instructors on another animation, called the ARA Project, was featured on the CG Society forum, as well as the Alias Web site, and it appeared on the Alias demo reel shown at Siggraph.
Instructors (including Tobon, Flores and Wolgemuth) were also voted onto the front page of CG Society.org for their entry in VFX Wars, “to see who could come up with the best concept art,” said Wolgemuth.
See "Flight of Icarus" at the CG Society website.
