The inspiration came from the Apple television advertisement entitled “Tree Trimming” which I thought would be fun to recreate with CG and it gave me some boundaries to work within since this project is very open-ended and I could easily get carried away without any direction.
The basis of the original video is a clay animation (similar to the 1964 “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer”) of the PC and Mac characters decorating a Christmas tree. Mac talks about how nice it is that they’re putting their differences aside and having fun together. Then when Mac asks PC to turn on the lights PC hesitates before doing so and apologizes to Mac when he sees “PC RULES” written in lights.
I’ve tried to be as faithful to the original commercial as possible. Close inspection of the high definition video from Apple’s website makes it clear that the original animation was done using clay animation. It’s possible to see reflections of the work bench and animators in the tree ornaments and the detail in the clothing of the characters is beyond something that can be achieved with CG because, as was discussed in lecture a few times, it’s incredibly difficult to create computer graphics which look “imperfect” enough to be real. My animation is a simplified version of the original with no clothes or facial expressions simply because doing so would be a challenge beyond the time frame for this project, and beyond what I have learned in Maya.
All of the modeling was done by myself, in Maya, starting with polygonal or NURBS primitives.
The characters both started off as a cube that was extruded to create the torso, limbs, neck and head. Facial features and other details were achieved using the same technique and by adding subdivisions in areas that required more polygons to achieve greater detail. The only part of the characters that was created with NURBS was the eyes. Much of the colour was a Lambert Material with solid colours to give it a non-reflective look. The pupils were created by rotating the eyes 90 degrees around the x-axis (so that the poles are on the z-axis) and a “ramp” colour (basically a gradient) was applied so that the top of the circle (the pupil) was black while the rest stayed white. The characters were also given a skeleton which was bound to the skin to allow for the animation of the characters.
The ground and backdrop started off as polygonal planes. The ground was shaped into hills using “soft mods” and the snow effect was created using a Maya texture which mimics snow on the ground, however during the final rendering it’s not possible to see this detail.
The trees in the background are just polygonal cones that were deformed in a way to make them look crooked and like a pine tree covered with snow. Again the Lambert Material was used create the non-reflective finish.
The Christmas tree was constructed like this: A polygonal cone was created for the base and it was wrapped with a plaid texture that was found on Google Image Search. The trunk of the tree is an extruded pentagon with a procedural texture applied to it that mimics the look of wood; this is a feature in Maya. The “branches” were n-sided pyramids with the points of the base moved around to create the “jagged” look of the brnches, the base was then extruded to give the look of thickness and the center point of the base was moved up to make each section look like a cone. The branches of the tree got the same Lambert Material and a green colour to make it look like the original.
The star on the tree was made by joining a bottom-less cone with a mirrored pentagonal pyramid and it was all wrapped in an Anisotropic Material with Illumination to make it look like shining gold.
The ornaments on the tree are a combination of a sphere and torus shape with a Phong Material that gives off a very nice reflection when rendered with the “mental ray” renderer.
Finally, the lights and electric chords were cylinder shapes which were twisted around each other and were given a green colour. The lights were made of a green cylinder base with a semi-transparent rounded-cylinder for the light bulb with illumination turned up (when the lights were on). The lights were also given a skeleton to easily allow manipulation and placement around the tree and in the shape of letters.
Once the models were all created and the scene was set up I followed the original video to guide me through the positions and timing of the animation. Since I was modeling two characters there was quite a bit of key framing to do for each: positioning their arms, head, and the decorations. This process was very tedious, time consuming, and not fun at all. However the trick to doing larger animations (like motion pictures) is to create “cycles” which can be re-used (i.e. walking cycles), and apply motion paths and motion capturing. These are all these things that help the pros make the task of animating easier and less time consuming.
In my animation there is one main light source in the scene (above the cameras) which I found to be enough to illuminate the scene and the characters.
There are three cameras: center, right, and left. The cameras are stationary during the animation, as they are in the original. The center camera captures the characters, Christmas tree, and the background with infinite depth of field while the left and right cameras capture the PC and Mac characters respectively and have enough depth of field to blur out the trees in the background.
The animation was rendered using Maya’s “mental ray”[1] rendering engine at the “Production” quality preset. In total 670 frames were rendered on a P4 2.4GHz machine with 512MB of RAM, the time it took to render the animation was 12 hours (a little over a minute per frame). The output (uncompressed tiff images) was then loaded into QuickTime Pro as an image sequence and saved as an uncompressed AVI file. The AVI file was then imported into Adobe Premiere along with the original soundtrack and my credit image and it was all exported as an H.264 encoded MOV file. Finally that file was encoded as DivX using Dr. DivX.
[1] http://www.mentalimages.com/
I decided to use Maya for my animation because it’s a powerful, industry-standard, modeling and animation application. I had an excellent book to use as a reference: Learning Autodesk Maya 8[2] which has some good tutorials and proved useful a few times.
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Autodesk-Maya-Foundation-DVD/dp/189717733X/ref=pd_sim_b_3
I took note of the first point from the project outline and tried to avoid being too ambitious. I had to abandon the idea of creating the clothing for the characters and animating their mouth movements simply because I’m not that skilled in Maya and trying to do so would leave me out of time to complete the project.
The main limitation was my inexperience with Maya – however I did not find the learning curve for it to be as steep as others have. I’ve done 3D modeling before in AutoCAD and I’ve done timeline animations in Flash so I have some background in each and those skills were transferable to Maya. The main problem I find with Maya, especially after having taken COSC 3P94, is it’s poor interface – which may be a contributor to the trouble newcomers have when learning Maya.
Besides the obvious “how to model and animate using Maya.” I’ve learned that making a 3D animation takes a lot of work and it’s no wonder that large studios like Pixar Animation Studios employ so many people: from modelers, to riggers, animators, programmers, etc. I was amazed when I watched the credits roll by after watching Wall-E this holiday to discover just how many people are involved in creating a movie like that and it’s a shame that people take this work for granted and download movies.
If you watch the original clay animation carefully you will notice a few continuity errors, notably: the position of the lights on the tree, the number of ornaments on the tree, the missing ornaments once the star is up, and the sudden appearance of the star from behind Mac’s back. I’ve decided to leave in the “sudden star appearance” and the “extra ornament disappearance” continuity errors in my animation.
Somehow (probably an error occurred when I was importing) the PC character’s pants got the same procedural wood texture applied to them as the tree trunk instead of the original painted khaki colour. I noticed this when I started to animate the characters and thought it looked pretty groovy so I left it in.
Trying to export the video from Premiere proved to be a challenge - the only format that would “properly” export the entire animation was QuickTime. However during the export process there was a sound glitch, I don’t know why it’s there because it’s not there in the WAV file, but rest assured it’s not some mind control noise I put in on purpose.
All models created by Ned Kahvo.
All animation done by Ned Kahvo.
Plaid texture at base of tree was found on Google Image Search.
Soundtrack from the Get a Mac Ad: "Tree Trimming"
Based on the Get a Mac Ad: “Tree Trimming”