Digital Frontier uses SOFTIMAGE|XSI to make "Appleseed" an Anime classic for the 21st Century
By Alexandra Pasian

If you think you know Anime, you haven’t seen Appleseed.  With this entirely 3D film, Japan’s Digital Frontier has taken traditional Anime to a whole new level.  Appleseed represents a new style in animation in which CG characters look like old school Anime but move like real people.  The artists at Digital Frontier call it 3D Live Anime.  You’ll call it amazing. 

To get to these new heights in animation, Digital Frontier put together a hugely talented team, used a considerable amount of motion capture and, of course, took full advantage of SOFTIMAGE|XSI.

The film’s producer, Sori, who first worked as an animator on James Cameron’s Titanic, explains how the idea to create 3D Live Anime came about: “I wanted to make a full 3D-CG film, but I worried that it would be difficult to convince the audience to empathize with 3D characters.  I have watched Anime since I was a child, and I understand the connection between the audience and this style of characters.  It seemed a natural fit to combine the two.”

With an assembled team of over 70 talented CGI animators, Sori produced over 100 minutes, including 1300 cuts, for this 3D CG film in a single year.  Although they were working in an entirely new style of animation, the team at Digital Frontier, with SOFTIMAGE|XSI at their fingertips, were more than ready to meet the challenge. Almost all of the 138 characters for Appleseed were created in SOFTIMAGE|XSI.  Among other things, XSI was used in modeling and character set-up.  According to Kawamura, Director of Animation at Digital Frontier: “Using XSI made character set-up fast and easy.  With other software packages, we would have had to write editors, but, with XSI, all we had to do was drag & drop.” 

Otsuka, the CGI Director, adds: “Without XSI, we would have had to spend huge amounts of energy setting up so many characters.  But we were able to save both time and resources using the scripting functions in XSI.  We were also able to build a motion library based on the Animation Mixer, which proved incredibly useful for our group work.”

In addition, the development team at Digital Frontier used SOFTIMAGE|XSI for camera and character loading and saving.  Kawamura explains: “We imported the motion capture data into XSI and applied it to the different characters.  It would have been impossible to manage over 1300 cuts without the scripting functions in XSI.” 

According to both Kawamura and Otsuka, the Toon Shader in XSI was also key in the development of the Appleseed characters: “With the Toon Shader, we were able to achieve amazing results.  Our standards are very high, and XSI more than meets them.  We were so impressed by the quality of work that we were able to get.  Of course, we tried other software packages, but nothing compares to XSI.” 

In order to have their characters express realistic emotion, the team at Digital Frontier focused a great deal of time and energy on facial animation.  Traditional Japanese Anime does not synchronize voice and lip movement, so, here again, the creative team was working in uncharted territory. 

A Facial Capture system allowed Digital Frontier to create a new kind of Anime character whose facial expressions were as large as “real life”.  Then, the team synched the voices to these new, more expressive faces.  Using the Audio tools in XSI, they were able to precisely map voices over their characters.  The final result is a collection of characters who have faces that look like traditional Anime but can express realistic emotion through movement and perfectly lip-synced voices.

XSI was also instrumental in helping the team to get the exact look that they wanted for these Anime characters in 3D.  In any Anime style animation, the contour line is extremely important.  According to Kawamura: “The contour rendering in XSI is excellent. It allowed us, for example, to modify the thickness of the line based on the characters’ distance from the camera, a smashed line in the distance versus a more precise line close up.  XSI allowed us to create an expression  that would change according to the line’s relationship with the camera.”

As with any 3D project, in the end, a great deal depends on the rendering.  According to Otsuka: “The rendering in XSI is so much faster than anything any other software.  We could not have imagined working on this project without the Render Pass functionality in XSI.  This film required us to render a huge number of images, and we knew that we had to have an efficient workflow to manage our production.”

Otsuka goes on to explain: “One of the ways in which XSI helped with our production workflow was during the compositing.  Instead of creating separate scenes and rendering each one individually, which is prohibitively heavy, we simply created separate passes for shadows, reflections and matt.  We then used each pass in one scene.  This is an unbelievable innovation.”

From the innovations in SOFTIMAGE|XSI to the creative leaps made by Digital Frontier, Appleseed is clearly the Anime for the future.  Welcome to the 21st century.

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