Street Cred uses signage identifying such store names as Scooby’s House of Snacks, McKimson’s Chicken and Biscuits and The Anvil Depot.

Backgrounds also feature lots of knowing details, including references to cartoon characters and famous animators that are woven throughout the environments. For instance, in Street Cred, a strip mall-lined street featured signage identifying such store names as Scooby’s House of Snacks, McKimson’s Chicken and Biscuits and The Anvil Depot. In addition to the scripts, Cartoon Network provided model sheets and bibles for its shows, which the animation team utilized to create the characters that appeared in the interstitials, and vector artwork from the promotions department, which production designers used to create the backgrounds.

The Process
The first step in the production process was to take photos of buildings, streetlights, fire hydrants and other elements characteristic of an urban street scene. “We really wanted the environments to look real, but still have the warped perspective lines and vivid color schemes common to 2D backgrounds,” says Geoff Valent, Animal Logic’s animation supervisor. After assembling a library of reference images, the company created concept art of the buildings, locations and props needed for the backgrounds.

Animal Logic strived to make the environments look real in Good Car Day, but still show the warped perspective lines and vivid color schemes common to 2D backgrounds.

“From there, we started to build and texture the elements in 3D, which were then stretched, warped and twisted using lattices,” Valent explains. “We’ve been using V-Ray as our primary rendering package for a long time and really wanted to take advantage of the fast ray-tracing and global illumination. So all of our textures were based around rendering with V-Ray.

“The biggest advantage of using global illumination is the accurate shadows, and bouncing of light,” Valent continues. “In fact, many of our scenes, especially the downtown ones, were lit with a single light. Lighting scenes this way saves a lot of time, which can be put into other areas.”

While the 3D elements were coming together, Cartoon Network began sending in the scripts. “Usually you get a script and a storyboard from a client, but for this project we created the storyboards from our end,” explains Valent. “Thanks to the awesome Cartoon Network writers, we were given a lot of freedom to add our own creative ideas into the final bump.”

Once Cartoon Network approved Animal Logic’s storyboards, the vfx house started animating layouts in 3D, which served as background plates for the 2D animators. “Because we were working to a pretty tight schedule, the layouts were done very rough and fast, and then tweaked after the backgrounds had gone to the 2D animators,” Valent reports. Once the 3D animation was finished, the scenes were rendered. “Although the 3D elements were built with quite a lot of detail, most scenes required shot-by-shot set dressing, and increased texture and mesh resolution.”

The 3D renders and 2D character animations were then passed to the compositing team, which used After Effects and Combustion to composite, add shadows and grade.