Softimage in Howl’s Moving Castle

[Jacques]

I watched Howl’s moving Castle, the brilliant Studio Ghibli film, on the weekend and followed up with the bonus disc. In the making of snippet they showed how they used Harmony and Softimage to create the movement of Howl’s castle, as well as some of the 200 other CG shots in the film.
Not a lot was done as traditional 3D, most of the shots were of painted cell images ‘pasted’ to moving 2D surfaces, these would then be animated, transformed and stretched to convey movement, squash/stretch etc. They also developed their own shaders to create hand drawn shadows (as opposed to standard toon shaders) and hand drawn looking line shadows. All very ingenious!
I believe the Studio was on NT/2000 boxes at this time but they were in the middle of transitioning between 4.0 and the new interface.
Well worth a watch!

 

[Elf]

Edit: With apologies, I no longer wish to have involvement with SGUG or SGI communities in general,
and have also chosen to remove all of my content. Many things have changed since I co-founded, named, and ultimately
then left SGUG. There are many good people around, to whom I apologize for frustrating by removing these things, and
also many petty people that over the years whittled down both the enjoyment as well as sense of obligation I used to
feel to anyone else regarding what was ultimately just a hobby. Unfortunately one of the latter now writes the rules
and so it is time for me to take my things and go.

This message will replace all of my previous forum posts because deleting threads that I started would have removed
other peoples' posts.

 

[Jacques]

I would rip the feature and upload it but I’m not playing the whole copyright game. Unless there is somewhere other than YT or Vimeo to upload it to?

 

[Elf]

Edit: With apologies, I no longer wish to have involvement with SGUG or SGI communities in general,
and have also chosen to remove all of my content. Many things have changed since I co-founded, named, and ultimately
then left SGUG. There are many good people around, to whom I apologize for frustrating by removing these things, and
also many petty people that over the years whittled down both the enjoyment as well as sense of obligation I used to
feel to anyone else regarding what was ultimately just a hobby. Unfortunately one of the latter now writes the rules
and so it is time for me to take my things and go.

This message will replace all of my previous forum posts because deleting threads that I started would have removed
other peoples' posts.

 

[Jacques]

I'll have a look into Archive.org...for Educational / archival purposes...of course!