Starting in 2005, it took three years to make Battle For Terra and the stereoscopic aspect was added for cinema release in May 2009. After designing the characters, sets and props, I started  the first year by creating and editing an advanced 3D animatic that included creating most of the final 3D modeling, lighting and camera. After full financing came in, a couple of interns and digital artists were brought in to help wrap up animatics and quickly head into production. The completed animatic was more than just a template, but the first pass of the entire film with a large amount of the digital art complete. This was vital if we were to complete such an ambitious project with a very low budget.

The second year was spent in full animation production with a team averaging 20 artists. This typically broke down into six LightWave artists, six Maya character animators, a rigger and a compositor.  The team was rounded out by an infrastructure supervisor, a tech support person and a couple of interns. My role during production included CG supervisor, character animation supervisor and LightWave digital artist. I had the opportunity to direct during dailies in the morning and artist walkthroughs in the afternoon. The rest of my time was spent as one of the digital artists churning out hundreds of final shots.

Towards the end of the second year we had an opportunity to screen a rough cut at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival, so we pushed through the remaining shots and created a temp sound mix for the presentation. After strong reviews and interest in distribution we spent the first few months of 2008 wrapping up production and doing a proper sound mix. It was at this time that I brought up the fact that the production was designed with the possibility of going stereoscopic 3D at any time. The idea was immediately embraced by the producers and distributors, so another three months was added to the schedule to re-render the entire film from a second camera perspective. Final 3D animation was completed by April for a May 2009 release.

Beaver Project was used to communicate between Maya and LightWave. The process was surprisingly drama-free. Beyond the program's stability a major reason for its success was having Beaver Project developer Christian Aubert in-house for several weeks to make sure things ran properly.

Our pipeline was quite simple. After LightWave animatics were edited and voice recording was complete, our locked edit was scheduled out to the artists. We had essentially two teams: Maya (character animation) and LightWave (everything else). When character animation was approved, the character deformations were sent to LightWave for final render. Both Maya and LightWave artists had to complete a very high volume of work, several times more than the industry standard.

LightWave shots were rendered without GI (to save time) but with several 'spinning light' tricks to simulate the expensive technology. 200 CPUs rendered 24/7. We had only one compositor so more than half the shots were accomplished entirely in-camera without multiple elements. It was imperative to keep the pipeline as simple as possible if we were to finish the project on time and budget. The final edited film was exported directly out of Final Cut Pro directly to the lab, again to save time and money.

Since the project started three years ago, LightWave 8.3 was used. We never do version upgrades during a production since it could break the pipeline.

Read the making of on the menithings site:
Part one
Part two