Developing those shaders wasn't a hassle at all. I've always said that it was more of an interesting challenge. The look we were shooting for wasn't exactly 2D or 3D. We wanted the character geometry to register as a 3D model, but no matter what angle it's viewed from, the crayon stroke had to look flat, as if it had just been lifted off the paper. I called the look two-and-a-half D.
I had 2 days of R&D on those shaders and in that span, thanks to the render tree tools, I was able to pursue a number of different approaches. I ventured pretty deep into the texture warping tools and learned some pretty nasty tricks, but in the end, we were able to get the look we wanted with a pretty simple shader. This was a relief because it ended up being a quick render.
As for the rigging, this job was our first big test of XSI's non linear workflow. We had a really short production schedule, so rigging, modeling, & animating happened concurrently with the design and creative phase. We built the rig before the character's design had been finished. We started animating before the creative was finished.
The initial rig was intended to be as simple as possible, but as the spot evolved, the character had to interact with the crayon and the environment in ways that required a more complex rig. Meanwhile, because of the schedule, the animators couldn't wait for a more advanced rig, so they plowed ahead animating on simpler ones.
As the rig got more complex (IK/FK blending, heel/toe roll, etc.) , the already completed animation was transferred from one to the next. The character's geometry, envelopes and all, was snapped from one rig to the next. The character design was also being modified as the job progressed, so those changes were propogated into the setup. And when we were finally able to come up for air, there were secondary animation effects that had to get layered on top of everything else.
I doubt we would have been able to pull that job off as well as we did in as short a production cycle without XSI.
-Brad
Bradley R. Gabe
3D Technical Director | Quiet Man | NYC
Actually one of my ex-animator/ colleague worked on the 'crayon man' spot with QUIETMAN. They used XSI 1.5 on a NT workstation. From what I hear it was a real hassle to find the right shader on him. By incorporating a IK/FK setup they managed to pull off the job.