FRAMESTORE CFC EMPLOYS MAXON SOFTWARE FOR 'COMPASS' WORK
December 11, 2007

FRAMESTORE CFC EMPLOYS MAXON SOFTWARE FOR 'COMPASS' WORK

The film is based on Philip Pullman's trilogy "His Dark Materials," and is set in a parallel world in which witches rule the northern skies, ice bears talk and act as brave warriors, and humans are entwined with animal spirits. The movie focuses on the adventures of a young girl who embarks on a journey from school in Oxford to the magical heart of the frozen top of the world. Her companion through some of her adventures is lorek Byrnison, a gigantic, armored polar bear.

Framestore CFC spent over 15 months working on the film's bears and the environments in which they appear. BodyPaint 3D (www.maxon.net) was used extensively throughout the creation process to paint texture maps for the bears, Ragnar, the guard bears, their armor, props, digital doubles and environments.

"BodyPaint 3D was particularly useful when painting the complex organic shapes of lorek's rusted beaten metal armor," notes Daren Horley, CFC's lead texture paint supervisor. Having the ability to load a scene that contained multiple file formats with texture maps also proved invaluable in order to instantly view the pieces of armor and how they related to each other. "The interlocking forms had rubbed parts of shiny metal in the overlapping areas, which needed to be accurately painted. BodyPaint 3D enabled us to do this."

 

While many of the environments were visualized through matte paintings, some were created using rendered, texture painted geometry in BodyPaint 3D, including the environments of Ragnar's palace, and the bear fight arena.