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We propel the world’s most influential brands, agencies, and studios with cutting-edge 3D character animation. Our full-service production team creates engaging content across a variety of platforms, both as the lead creative studio and a service production studio.
Our 3D productions can be seen in films, TV, commercials, music videos, games, social media, and more. From the initial character design to animation to the final render, we’re always venturing beyond the limits of what’s possible.
Taking inspiration from your story and vision, we explore various styles with you, determining which conveys the personality and message most effectively. The characters are developed in order to interact with their environment as intended, from how they move around to how they express emotion in their facial expressions. Once a style or design is decided, we create a plain 3D sculpt that incorporates accurate topology. This is the basis for early animation tests before applying colors, textures, and shading.
Starting with the plain 3D sculpted model, we breathe more life into the character through things like color, texture and reflectivity. The texture maps can be created using a variety of methods such as 2D painting, 3D scanning, photogrammetry, or painting directly on the 3D model. Our artists will paint on colors and gradients that properly interact with light, giving a more natural appearance to things like clothing.
In one of the final pre-production steps, we give the character a skeletal structure through rigging. We establish their rules for movement, which allows our team to animate them efficiently and precisely. And for quick reference, our team produces character sheets showing the character in T-pose and some other key poses.
With great attention to detail, we develop the hair style based on our character sheets before we begin to animate. For the highest-quality stylized hair, we brush and groom thousands of strands with care. Having various tools at our disposal, we color, flick, frizzle, curl, and clump. Even if animation has started, our procedural pipeline allows us to update a character or creature's hair style as we progress through production.
Character clothing can be applied at various times throughout production. If clothing is fixed to the body, it is usually added in during character development. If clothing needs to move independently from the body, it is applied later and simulated with dynamics in Cinema 4D, Maya, or Marvelous.
By utilizing our rigs and controllers set up during pre-production, the characters are ready to be animated. Our in-house motion capture studio offers a full suite of services including body, face, and hand capture, an expert team of on-site technical directors, and data cleaning capabilities. After mocap data is captured, our team cleans up using keyframe animation, eliminating any inconsistencies in the form of the character or its movements. This saves an incredible amount of production time vs. traditional keyframe animation. Whether using traditional animation or our cutting-edge motion capture system, your character’s actions will be realistic or uniquely expressive.
During animation production our team models and textures environments and props, then lights each scene. Character performance can be captured before or during this stage. Once animation is complete, and the characters and props have been fully integrated into the scene, our VFX artists apply simulated effects, render, and composite.
In the final stage, our editor will color correct shots as needed for consistency. The sound designer finalizes the composed music bed, and mix/masters with sound effects and voice overs.
