Lasting impressions: off-the-shelf software gives a 3D animation its painterly look. (Cover Story).

For years animator Umesh Shukla's dream has been to see a feature animation created with 3D graphics and rendered entirely in an impressionist style. Indeed, in the opinion piece, "Beyond Realism" (see Viewpoint, December 1999, pg. 22), he wrote, "I believe that in order to gain status as fine artists, CG animators need to follow the example of the impressionists and begin presenting alternative interpretations of reality."

So this year, when he found time between a job he was leaving at Disney Feature Animation and one he was about to start at DreamWorks, he took mouse in hand, put his money where his mouth was, and decided to produce a short animation in an impressionistic style. "I wanted to do something quickly that would show people it can be done," he says. In the process of creating that film, "Still I Rise," his preconceived notions of how to create a painterly look changed as he discovered inexpensive tools that allowed him to achieve masterful results.

For a story, he turned to a subject he had long found fascinating: Joseph (aka John) Merrick, the elephant man. "I was watching a documentary on the Discovery Channel a few years back and caught the last four lines of Merrick's autobiography, `Was I so tall, could reach the pole, or grasp the ocean with a span; I would be measured by the soul, the mind's the standard of the man.' They hit me straight on. I bought every book I could get, and the more I read, the more I admired him for not jumping off a cliff. Living with that kind of deformity was very difficult."

It was so difficult that one afternoon in 1890, rather than sleeping with his head on his knees as usual, Merrick lay down on his bed and suffocated. Shukla says, "He knew he wasn't supposed to lie flat on his back; he knew it could be fatal. But he did anyway." Shukla began wondering what Merrick's dreams might have been as he fell asleep for the last time, and those thoughts coalesced into a story for the film. When Shukla realized that the impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh committed suicide a few months after Merrick died, he decided to create the film in Van Gogh's impressionist style.

Once he had a storyboard sketched out, he assembled a team of people interested in working on the independent project. The team chose to use a technique described in a paper written by Barbara J. Meier that was published in the 1996 Siggraph Proceedings for creating and placing brush strokes on each point of a 3D model. They began running tests using Van Gogh's paintings as reference images for the brush strokes. "The tests were successful," Shukla says, "but it was taking a long time to do, and people began losing interest in the project. They had their own lives." He began working on his own.

"Fortunately, my animation needs were fairly simple," he says. "I didn't need fancy IK or muscle deformation systems. There were no characters emoting." In fact, he discovered that Creative Labs' Poser was sufficient for the animation. He imported models already created ...