Axisvfx: Don’t worry, be happy
We talk to axisvfx, who were tasked with bringing Happy from the pages of Grant Morrison’s graphic novel to the Syfy screen
Learn from axisvfx about their work bringing comic character Happy into the CG realm, for Syfy’s series about an ex-cop-turned-hitman’s crazy imaginary unicorn friend
We’re living in the golden age of television. Networks are taking more chances and most notably, experimenting with their source material. Happy! is one such show pushing the boundaries of entertainment. Based on the brutal graphic novel by Grant Morrison, it tells the story of an alcoholic ex-cop turned hitman Nick Sax and his imaginary friend, Happy the unicorn. axisvfx was tasked with taking Happy from the confines of his 2D pages and into a fully fledged 3D character in the real world.
“They were looking for a company that could bring an animation style that is slightly cartoony, a little bit of Roger Rabbit-ness to it, and bring it to life in a visual effects world,” explains axisvfx executive producer Paul Schleicher. “This project really is a hybrid between animation and visual effects. The animation styles are not as naturalistic as a lot of other types of visual effects projects, so that really spoke to our strengths.”
The team quickly got to work on the pilot, allowing time to iron out any kinks when it came to creating Happy. “As he’s an imaginary character, he does all kinds of wacky things,” explains axisvfx co-founder and VFX supervisor Grant Hewlett. “He can change his outfit in the blink of an eye, he can be wet, he can be dry, he can be dirty, he snorts cocaine, he does all kinds of stuff, so having all of those variations was pretty challenging.”
Post Pilot
Proceedings began with showrunner Brian Taylor’s very basic storyboards for placement, which the axisvfx team then embellished, leaving the animators some space to also come up with their own ideas. The pilot was incredibly well received from both Taylor and the network, with only a few minor issues to resolve. “From a lighting and compositing point of view, most of the things we worked through were stuff like getting the right kind of focus in the shots,” continues Hewlett. “A lot of dramas tend to be quite shallow focus so when for instance, they’re following Sax on quite a long lens and Happy’s meant to be next to him – what they found on the pilot was perhaps their focus was so shallow that there wasn’t really room to put Happy in that focus area. With the wrong kind of focus when you composite him, it really doesn’t look right. There was a lot of sensitivity to that and a lot of our work went on getting that focus right on a lighting and compositing side.”
Hewlett also explains that one of the team’s biggest issues was Happy’s size. “He changes size really but he’s roughly about the size of Sax’s head, everybody established. If he isn’t that sort of size
“EVEN though happy looks like quite a simple Character, he’s actually Got quite a lot of ENGINEERING within him” Paul Schleicher, executive producer, AXISVFX
then your idea of where he is in depth is going to be way off,” he explains.
streamlining THE APPROACH
After the show was greenlit, animation supervisor Friedl Jooste says it was clear that axisvfx had to scale up its animation team. “There was a big man hunt to find all the right people, which was really tricky because you had to find people with experience in cartoony-type animation,” he says. In the end, around 130 artists across axisvfx’s locations in Glasgow, London and Bristol worked on the show’s eight episodes. Working to a traditional TV schedule – tenweek blocks from edit to delivery – axisvfx delivered roughly 900 shots, starting in September 2017 right up until the end of January 2018. “We made up what we called the ‘Happy animation survival kit’ for all animators when they started, and it basically listed a lot of the rules and things that Brian didn’t like,” adds Jooste.
With such a huge volume of shots, the teams had to have a specific, streamlined approach to keep up with the demand. “We had to know the character, know the animation and know how to get it from tracking the shot to out the door as quickly as possible,” says Schleicher. CG supervisor Ross Gilbert was one team member at the forefront of this pressure, explaining that they often had to think on their feet when they would run into problems.
Working with Houdini, the team were able to craft these tools as and when they needed them. “The reason Houdini was so good is because it is such an open box,” says Gilbert. “We wrote a custom tool for Happy to allow artists to be able to actually render iterations of their lighting over and over again. I think some of the tools we wrote helped us to buy more time in lighting, which means it looks better – basically because you don’t have to wait so long to start a render, and you can actually spend that time making it look better.”
Fur Density
Happy is made up of 12 million strands of hair, so Gilbert and his team created a tool that would enable him to be his long and stretchy self without revealing any sort of bald spots. “The tool could alter the density of his fur, so if he’s very small in a shot, we could go for a low-density fur and have a much faster render,” adds Gilbert.
axisvfx also created an automatic shader and reflection pass that made it very easy to not have to think about some of the usual CG concerns. The team were able to simply click, drag and drop, and then comp would have their shader pass. “There were a lot of utilities that we made like that to speed up the interchange between 2D and 3D,” says Gilbert. “It meant renders didn’t come back that often because comp had the light groups that they needed to balance renders more efficiently on their side. We didn’t do as many renders as we might’ve done if we didn’t have some of the foresight we had in order to split things out, so comp could do a lot more.”
“Houdini is such a robust tool,” adds Schleicher. “We had lighters handling multiple shots, and we were able to publish light rigs and shader sets and move assets around with none of that confusion you might get with Maya and Arnold and something a bit more fiddly. We’ve all worked in those pipelines and it was a breath of fresh air to use something a bit more robust. Before that, we did actually look into using Clarisse for a while but it didn’t really
meet our needs at that point. It’s a greatlooking package but Houdini did it for us.”
Believing in HAPPY
While Happy embodies a very cartoon-like characterisation with his blue fur and bright pink horn, he was a still a photoreal and believable addition to the show’s weird and wonderful world. Taylor presented axisvfx with realistic references, such as horses’ hair, in order to create the balance between the two, and Happy went through roughly 90 versions of fur before that balance was achieved. “A lot of our comps were really well integrated, like highly photoreal, but then when you see the final grade, he’s almost sort of hyperreal. From the cartoon, you need to know that he’s imaginary the whole way throughout,” says Gilbert.
“He’s got all of the earmarks of a photorealistic creature: he’s got dynamic fur; he’s got top-of-the-range hair model shaders; he’s got subsurface scattering; he’s got really detailed textures – all the things you would find on a photoreal chimpanzee,” explains Schleicher. “And the rigging around his eyes – if you pull his eyes up to a massive size, all of his eyelids and everything will follow that and all of his fur will work with dynamics. even though he looks like quite a simple character, he’s actually got quite a lot of engineering within him.”
Happy is voiced by Patton oswalt, and Jooste says that one of the most important aspects in creating the character was ensuring that Happy delivered oswalt’s lines in the right way. “A lot of it was looking at shots to see if there was anything distracting in it,” he explains. “you want to suck the audience into what the character is saying and feeling and sometimes over animating takes that away from it. There was a fine balance of finding out how can we make him look really cartoony and fun but at the same time, we want the audience to really listen to what Happy is saying.”
Despite the project’s enormous undertaking, with Happy appearing in some 100 shots per episode, the team at axisvfx says that working on the character enabled them to create a number of tools that they’ll be utilising in the future, allowing them to continue to flourish in the hybridisation of visual effects and CGI. “I don’t suppose we’ll be asked to do any more blue horses, but we’ve developed a lot of processes and tools and clearly doing anything with huge amounts of animation isn’t going to be as scary,” says Hewlett. “No two projects are alike. It comes down to that confidence,” adds Jooste. “We know that we can succeed in long-form projects.”