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!
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!