Ottawa: To get cg animated series Rolie Polie Olie rolling, Nelvana’s technical wizards played a little trick with two software packages which were never meant to work together.

Delivering a workshop at the International Student Animation Festival of Ottawa (Oct. 21-24), Jordan Thistlewood, a Nelvana 3D technical director, explained how technology drove the creation of the series.

Nelvana programmers, Thistlewood explained, wrote a piece of proprietary software which allowed 3D animators to combine Alias| Wavefront with Softimage software, a piece of hocus-pocus the gods of software never intended.

‘The idea is they were never meant to cooperate. They were completely competitive packages right from the start,’ Thistlewood says.

Creating such software became necessary in 1997 when Nelvana launched production of its first in-house 3D animation series, Rolie Polie Olie.

Programmers in Toronto needed to come up with a conversion program which could read the low-resolution models being generated out of Paris-based production partner Metal Hurlant Productions, which uses Softimage. Back in Toronto, Nelvana’s animators were set up on sgi workstations using Alias|Wavefront software to create the high-resolution models.

The question was how to find a way to transform one to the other as teams on either side of the Atlantic coordinated efforts to create the ground-breaking animated series.

‘What it does is it understands the way the two softwares interpret animation instructions. It takes a look at the Softimage animation, and understanding the differences and knowing how to interpret it, it can then convert that into the format that Maya understands,’ Thistlewood says.

Animators working on the show in Toronto need simply type a command-prompt instruction to the system to assemble transmitted files. ‘It looks at the Softimage information, looks at our database of models, pulls those together, applies the converted animation to them and creates a Maya file,’ he explains.

Like most work today done at Nelvana, the entire process is completed through a Web-driven interface. In fact, custom Web pages control nearly all software, Thistlewood says.

While most companies have established some kind of project management network, Nelvana has taken it to extremes few animation houses have.

The network and Web interface simplifies the process considerably as Nelvana animators deal with more than 1,500 animated objects in the production Rolie Polie Olie.

by Peter Vamos