There are no traditional 3D models in this production. Worlds Away makes flat two-dimensional puppets that live in 3D. It is a bunch of flat planes like pieces of cardboard that are all linked together and texture mapped.

We don’t have a turntable. All the views except one are off camera. When an animator activates a slider, the models swap out seamlessly, the texture maps change and that gives the illusion that the character is transforming. All the characters are the same scale, so they can be merged into any scene. Every character works the same way.

BR: How do they animate body parts — like arms?

KL: For the arms, we have long, thin planes with arm artwork on them. One end of the plane is attached with a pivot point to the shoulder. So to have a character wave up and down, you could grab the pivot point and rotate the plane. We also have a bend modifier in the middle of the plane so the elbow can bend. And you can move parts forward or backward from camera view to make it look like characters’ body parts are interacting.

When an arm is animated in one view, the animation gets instanced across all the other versions of the character automatically.

For this project, Worlds Away uses Avid for animatics and Photoshop for artwork. Hand-drawn storyboards are scanned in and the rigging and layout departments work in Max.

BR: What about facial animation?

KL: We have one piece of geometry and a slider that changes which picture is shown. To make the mouth move… let’s say you want eight mouth shapes. We have one plane with a mouth on it, the neutral mouth. In Max, we create a multi/sub-object material. It’s basically a material made of multiple materials. So what we do is hook the multi/sub-object materials to a slider. When the animator picks the notch for material one or two, all the way to eight, it swaps pictures in and out. We use the same mouth shapes for all the characters. Notch number three is always the “O” shape no matter which character you’re animating.

BR: And the backgrounds?

KL: The backgrounds are done using a traditional multi-plane thought process. The art is mostly created by Max Ehrlich and Perry Gargano, with everything broken out in PhotoShop layers, including the props like desks and things like that. Max does the backgrounds and Perry does everything else. Sometimes the camera travels with a car and we put mountains in layers in the background. In other shots, we use the artwork for the road in a more traditional 3D sense by texture mapping onto a plane.

BR: Do you render the scenes in Max?

KL: Yes, we use Max’s default scanline renderer. We do what most people call self-illumination renders: There are no lights. We render almost as fast as we can get shots into the queue. We just had to re-render a scene with a monkey and a couple having sex, and it took five minutes. We don’t do any atmospheric effects, even though we could. If there’s a season two, we might try to mix in some of that stuff.

BR: So, could you quickly run through the whole process?

KL: For characters, first the artwork is generated. Then the different views for the characters are generated. They go to the rigging department, which maps the artwork onto planes for the characters. Then the characters are saved out in files.

For episodes, we come up with the boards and once they’re approved, we bring them into an Avid Xpress Pro at full uncompressed NTSC and our editor times the whole thing out. Once we have an animatic approved by the director, it becomes the blueprint for all the departments.