Presentation | SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 Sydney

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The Witch's Cat

SessionComputer Animation Festival - Animation Theater

DescriptionThis film tells the story of a Witch's familiar cat "Singe", which we wanted to imbue with a sense of personality and magic. Singe gave the character FX the deep challenge of creating a quadruped with a black, clean, expressive coat of fur and added wings. The witch "Maggie" and her princely boyfriend "Kelleth" fall for each other while Singe tries to stop their engagement with magic. Kelleth has fancy layered clothing with coat, epaulets, and dress shirt. Maggie has tall, curly hair and a hoop dress covered with scales. All these complex layers and simulations were set up to simulate automatically for most of the shots. As the cat and witch fight over a wand in her house, magic flies everywhere causing chaos and causing some items to turn into yarn and others to turn into mushrooms. These object-transition shots were artfully generated with an FX team that used a yarn-creation tool they developed and applied to simulation and deformations. The lighting team dealt with the same room throughout the animation, but pushed the colors and values throughout to match the mood of the witch and her cat.

The pipeline team used Solaris in Houdini to publish USD assets, and hierarchical USD layouts and shots, that could be referenced into Houdini, Maya, and Unreal Engine. They did this to be able to open up scenes in any of the software packages and play to each software's strengths in visualizing sets, animation, FX, and lighting from early on to final during production. Two students from our team presented about the pipeline at SIGGRAPH 2023.

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