Giant Studios' new animated short film FRUITS OF LABOR premiered this week in San Jose, California, and received a warm and enthusiastic response. The film features a cast of simple computer graphics characters - a shiny red apple, a man and a fly - animated in a stylized way and rendering with startling photo-realism. Rudy Poat, creative director for the project described the look as being, "something that looks like stop-motion and that fooled both the mind and the eye. We wanted to create genuine confusion about whether what you're seeing is real or not." To create this look Giant Studios made the film using SOFTIMAGE|XSI and rendered on BOXX Technologies' RenderBOXX. The story's realistic detail is a mixture of real-world photography and 3D computer graphics. Stitching together 360-degree photos created a spherical representation of the environment surrounding the apple, which was later imported into SOFTIMAGE. "All of the reflections are from the light bouncing off the spherical environment, with SOFTIMAGE doing all the calculations for us. We would have never been able to create such an elaborate radiosity effect without the powerful rendering capabilities of the RenderBOXX system," comments Poat. RenderBOXX's rendering performance coupled with SOFTIMAGE's interactive rendering feature helps Giant Studios keep a tight reign on productivity. Always looking toward the future, Giant Studios plans to integrate other popular 3D and animation solutions into its rendering and production pipeline. "We are building our own interface so we can use SOFTIMAGE|XSI as a hub to bring all the animation we create with other software packages such as Alias|Wavefront's Maya or Side Effects' Houdini into XSI to render all of our color and lighting work," explains Poat. RenderBOXX's ability to support all these cutting-edge software programs openly insures that Giant Studios will continue to have an efficient rendering solution.
