Mainframe Entertainment used the Kaydara FiLMBOX to help clean up and map motion captured with a real-time optical system.

In producing the animated tele-series Action Man, Vancouver-based Mainframe Entertainment, the facility that helped to revolutionize episodic CG animation for television with the release of ReBoot, (with Dot Matrix!) recently finished up the first episodes of Action Man for Hasbro Inc. The weekly 3D show is built around Alex Mann, an extreme sports superstar who doubles as a super-hero. Action Man will debut this Fall on the FOX Network.

Mainframe, which has five episodic shows to its credit, saw Action Man as an opportunity to improve its overall animation quality and produce a show that pushed the limits of long-format character animation. Mainframe also realized that because of the volumes of motion required, (extreme sports being, well, extreme) Action Man is seen as a departure from its previous works.

Because of the radical nature of extreme sports and the mind (and body) bending that extreme sports enthusiasts subject themselves to, Mainframe turned to a variety of tools, including Kaydara's FiLMBOX and Softimage, to help them achieve the level of realism that Hasbro and the company was looking for in Action Man.

Although the action sequences had to be realistic—especially those in which the main character takes part in extreme sports competitions—the directors didn't want the overall motion "look" to be completely photorealistic. Hasbro also was concerned about individual character moves and stressed that the way a particular character walked, sat, gave a "high-5," and interacted with other characters were important elements to both the characters and the story.

To help achieve these effects, Mainframe turned to Kaydara's FiLMBOX and Mainframe's mainstay animation solution, Softimage. "Softimage is our base animation package," said Mairi Welman, director of communications at Mainframe. "Then we use a whole bunch of proprietary programs plugged in on top. We also used Filmbox for editing in the motion capture."

Action Man is a new kids series scheduled to air this Fall on the FOX Network.

The team captured performance data using the Motion Analysis real-time optical system, and used FiLMBOX to filter, clean up, and map the resulting motion to the Action Man characters, all in real-time. "Softimage is still the best character animation package available for high end CG work," said Welman. "Filmbox works really well with Softimage and blended seamlessly with our proprietary stuff—so it wasn't a huge hassle to integrate it into our system. This is the first TV series we've done with both MoCap (motion capture) and keyframe animation. We're using the MoCap for action sequences that would take a long time to animate. That frees our animators up to work on the character-driven things like facial animation and lip-synching."

Three production designers and about 40 animators work on the series, with fluctuation depending on what else is moving through Mainframe's production pipeline at the time. The company relies on SGI-Irix workstations to push all the pixels as well as its own in-house render farm. Mainframe also has a talented maquette maker in Gideon Hay, who produces all of Mainframe's maquettes, which are sometimes digitally scanned to help speed things up in pre-production for the modeling team.

Mainframe animators also used FiLMBOX to produce libraries of motion, and create "move trees," or graphs of how characters would move: walking, crawling, standing up and sitting down. By using specified actors to produce the motion capture, and then creating character-specific motion libraries, Mainframe was able to preserve both character continuity and reality.

Mainframe found FiLMBOX to be highly compatible with their existing production pipeline, especially since animators could use the software to apply motion to their existing character skeletons. FiLMBOX enabled the animators to spend more time and effort on the close-up shots, including subtlety of body movement, and facial animation, the more highly detailed elements of the animations.

Creating and producing an animated series is a highly challenging endeavor, and Mainframe is no stranger to the task. "The whole thing is a challenge, really, from finding a worthwhile concept, to designing something truly unique (so many animated shows have a 'house' style slapped on them) to producing the show to the high standards we want while keeping the client happy and delivering on time to the broadcaster," said Welman. "Working with MoCap for the first time on this series was probably the biggest challenge, but the directors and crews have really risen to the challenge and the show absolutely kicks butt! You should take a look at it on Saturday mornings on Fox at 9:30. There really isn't anything comparable on TV."