Customer Showcase

To deliver the challenging project within a three-month period, Mikros image needed to bring their top talent together. Mikros image relied on Autodesk creative toolsets that would help the team leap into the cinematic world of the imaginative bear rug. Mikros image faced both artistic and technical challenges in the realization of The Bear project. The artistic challenges were focused primarily on the creation of human-like emotions in a CG bear character, whereas the technical challenges were focused on trying to achieve the photorealistic look of a furry rug.

In a case of life imitating art, The Bear director, Matthijs Van Heijningen, had a clear vision for the project from start to finish. Van Heijningen wanted to capture human-like emotions in a photorealistic brown bear while retaining the bear’s rug-like form. Additionally, he wanted to avoid a “cartoon-like” effect in the animation style since it could dehumanize the bear and lessen the animal’s emotional characteristics.

“One of our greatest challenges was the creation of facial expressions during the interview scenes,” says Guillaume Ho, CG supervisor. To guide the animation process, the director shot multiple scenes with real actors to capture facial expressions as a reference point for the 3D character animation in Maya. Ho goes on to explain, “with real actors and audio voiceovers as a reference point, we were able to recreate all of the gestures, movements, and emotional references in Maya for a more realistic result.”

Mikros image has built an extensive Maya-based 3D pipeline across their entire facility to meet demanding production requirements. Maya delivers a comprehensive creative feature set with tools for 3D animation, modeling, simulation, and rendering. Given the challenges with the project’s CG shots, a sophisticated rigging and simulation pipeline was required. “Maya delivered the creative toolset we needed to address the complexity of the project’s animation needs,” said Olivier Mitonneau, a Maya artist who worked on the promo.

Specifically, Maya nCloth was extremely valuable for developing dynamic cloth simulations and helping to create a realistic effect for the bear’s skin and fur. “In the interview scenes, the bear’s skin follows the form of the chair and when the bear moves his arms, the skin reacts in a very natural way. nCloth is a great tool for creating this type of dynamic animation,” said Mitonneau.

Along with Maya 3D animation software, Mikros image used Flame as an essential part of its compositing workflow and for all finishing. Although most of the CG imagery in The Bear was created using Maya, a few CG shots were also created directly in Flame. “Flame is an ideal tool for working interactively with a director or an agency,” says Laurent Creusot, Flame artist and VFX supervisor. “The tool’s interactivity gives artists the ability to make changes or additions very quickly and you can see the entire project globally rather than working shot by shot. There is significant value to the creative process given that you can better understand the different elements of each part of the project,” says Creusot. In addition, Lustre was used for final color correction on the project and Creusot adds “the interaction between Flame and Lustre is very user-friendly since you can share the project easily on both systems, which makes things very efficient.”