Radical 3D Takes a Generalist Approach to CG in Animal Armageddon

As animation and visual effects have become more complex has meant more and more specialization from artists to the point where they are only doing one small slice of a shot and then off it goes down the conveyor belt. While this allows for a high-level of expertise at each and every stage of a shot, it also can slow a production down to a crawl. This is fine for big feature films with the budget to accommodate it, but what if you are trying to pull off effects-heavy work on a basic cable budget. Then you need to have generalists that can do many different tasks, says Jason McKinley, owner of Radical 3D, which employed a generalists approach first on Dogfights for the History Channel. They upped the ante with this approach on Animal Armageddon, which includes 25 minutes per episode of full CG animation. We spoke with McKinely about the benefits and pitfalls of the generalist approach.
To read more about how the show was created read Beth Marchant’s article Reviving Dinosaurs—and Ancient Earth—for Animal Armageddon.
Describe the division of labor and the generalist approach on Animal Armageddon.
In a traditional pipeline you have a modeler, rigger, character animator, lighting person, someone doing the break out of a scene and a compositor. We have one person doing break-out, lighting and comp. Some are doing 3D and 2D work, and they are also doing the visual effects – particle work, smoke, fire, clouds and anything else you can imagine

We had a combination approach on Animal Armageddon. There were specialists. We had character modelers and environmental modelers who set the initial scenes up. After that it became a more general. We had specialized character animators doing about a third of the shots but we also had generalists doing the other two-thirds of the shots. The character animators did the hero shots and the walk cycles, and then our team of generalists would come in and do all the rest. They did all the break-out and comp work, the lighting and so on.

Why do you work this way?
It has allowed us to condense manpower. Instead of having seven people working on a shot we may just have two or three people. It saves time and money, especially with people who have a broad range of talents from effects to character animation to comp and lighting. Having that talent has enabled us to move really fast. With a team of 20 people we’re pumping out 50-60 shots a week of finished, full-CG animation, character animation with full CG environments. Obviously the per shot-cost is incredibly low, but at the same time it has enabled us to produce this type of show where there is about 25 minutes of full computer animation per episode. We’re doing that on a basic-cable budget. It’s a similar approach we took on Dogfights but taking it to the extreme because of the character work.

You are also one of the executive producers on this show. Does that allow you to take this streamline approach?
On Dogfights and Animal Armageddon we are part of the production company (Digital Ranch) as well. That allows us to do a lot of animation quicker because all the approvals are in-house. I have a lot more control over the shots and how quickly they get done. I’m also aware of all the pitfalls of CG whereas an outside producer may not be. They may ask for changes and tweaks that may seem like small requests but will take two weeks. Because we are controlling the creative internally we can put a lot more animation into the show.

We have very few revisions, maybe two or three per shot. Now if we were doing this work for an outside company they are going to want five to 20 revisions per shot. That kills time and budgets, and in the end the shot doesn’t look any better. That’s the biggest difference in the way we work. We are an effects company but we’re more of a production effects company – we produce shows that are heavy on visual effects. It allows us to put out an insane amount of animation. On the last season of Dogfights we put out 15 hours of computer animation in 10 months. On Animal Armageddon we are putting out around four hours of full CG, character and environment animation in 10 months on a basic cable budget

Do you help craft the show from the outset?
We work with the writers and the supervising producer to help guide them through what is and isn’t possible under the budget parameters. We’ve had issues where there was supposed to be a tsunami, like the one in Deep Impact. But those are $1 million shots, literally. We can’t compete with that unless we took the entire series’ budget to create that one shot. Of course the audience at home doesn’t care what our budget is so we have to come up with smart ways to construct shots and the story itself to be able to deliver high quality work.

What’s the downside of this generalist approach?
The downside is the consistency across shots. In any company you are going to have varying levels of talent across the board. Every now and then you will have a situation where people aren’t paying attention to the lighting so you have one scene that has a golden look to it and the next shot is blue. Communication is the key, especially at the speed we are going.

What is supposed to happen, and this usually works, is that the lighting and environment is pre-set. Theoretically all you have to do is drop in your model and animation and everything should be ready to go. But then when people start tweaking things they may put on a different filter or somehow the settings get changed.

In this age of specialization, do you find it difficult to find artists that are generalists and can work this way?
People coming out of school usually have that sensibility. We work a lot with the DAVE School. About three-quarters of the people here went to that school. Those students come out pretty well-rounded. Compare that to myself who is self-taught, I am only really good at lighting and camera work. I have very little ability to comp or do character work. These guys are better versed in all aspects. Now of course almost everyone will be better at some things than others. I tell them to find out what they are good at and do it. The guys that can be true generalists and do basically anything from effects particle work, to compositing to character work, those guys are gold.

Do the tools you use determine whether you can take such an approach?
This generalist approach does seem to be a LightWave phenomenon. You usually don’t hear about a Maya generalist. They are almost always specialized. You can probably do 90 percent of all visual effects in LightWave. There are some limitations to the software, especially in terms of character animation, but the render engine is at least tow times as fast and sometimes 10 times as fast as any other software out there.

To read more about how Animal Armageddon was created, read Beth Marchant’s article Reviving Dinosaurs—and Ancient Earth—for Animal Armageddon, which originally appeared in the March edition of The Plug-In Post.