3DTotal: You had the chance to work on The Mummy: Tomb of The Dragon Emperor back in 2007. Can you tell us about the experience and the challenges it presented?
Francisco: I had the great opportunity to work with a very talented team over at Digital Domain as the Modeling Supervisor for the project. The scope of the project was quite large, so the film’s CG work was split between D.D. and Rhythm & Hues Studios. Modeling-wise, we implemented a high-detail modeling pipeline using Maya for cage modeling, ZBrush for detail sculpting and CySlice for 32-bit displacement extractions. I worked closely with Stan Seo, our Texture Lead, as well as one of our CG Sups, Dave Hodgins, to better integrate our modeling, ZBrush sculpting and texturing workflows.

Overall, the film presented some very unique and difficult challenges. One of the biggest I believe was the integration of traditionally built 3D characters and creatures from Maya with 3D dynamics and fluid effects from Houdini. For example, for the main terracotta emperor character played by Jet Li, we first modeled and textured his outer Terracotta shell as well as his inner “scorched” mummy (using Maya, ZBrush and Deep paint). The character was then rigged and animated using both motion capture and key frame animation. Using proprietary techniques, the mesh was processed so that custom 3D effects like fire, molten lava and a physics-based cracking system could be applied in Houdini. The process was quite challenging, but in the end it was a great integration of various techniques that had never been used in such a way before and it achieved a very creative and detailed result.

3DTotal: And what about more recently? What projects have you been involved with over the last few years?
Francisco: I have been busy working with several games studios on a variety of exciting projects. These include THQ/Volition’s Red Faction: Armageddon, Sony/Guerrilla Game's Killzone 3 and Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain. At the moment, I'm in the process of expanding and am looking into hiring artists to handle larger amounts of work and new types of projects. It’s been an amazing journey so far and hopefully I can continue to work on these kinds of projects in the future.

3DTotal: That’s a pretty impressive list of games! Now I imagine every project presents its own set of particular problems in regards to different software, pipelines and project criteria, but what general practices have you seen alter most over the years from the point of view of character development?
Francisco: I believe there are two things: the first is the emergence of polygon-based pipelines over the older NURBS-based systems. In 1995, almost all digital characters for film and special effects were built with NURBS or some variation of it, carrying with it some very severe restrictions. Most large animation and effects shops built their pipelines and tools around it, while most independent artists and small shops had little or no access to any special tools. All this began to change after Pixar’s

animated short Geri’s Game was released in 1997. In my opinion, this was the catalyst that helped push polygon-based subdivision surfaces into mainstream movie and special effects pipelines. Polygonal modeling was used back then, but due to the lack of technology in hardware and software, they had to be dense and were difficult to rig and animate. Most large animation studios and VFX shops stayed away from polygon-based pipelines until they had a way of using lower resolution polygonal cages to generate subdivision surfaces at render time, giving them the flexibility and efficiency they needed. Coupled with the incredible growth in cheaper and faster computer technologies and the video game industry, polygon pipelines and techniques have dominated the CG landscape. Our industry has not been the same since.

The second is the incredible growth and integration of motion capture with key framed animation in both film and games. Most of us that have been around for some time remember when motion capture was considered a “crutch” or a “cheat” by some people in our industry. I see many similarities with the advent of the still camera and how it was initially rejected by many, but eventually it was accepted as another powerful tool for artists to use. Motion capture now holds a solid place as a key tool in animation to acquire real-life motions to be used and molded to fit the needs of artists in both films and video games.