3D World’s question of the month

Did you know that Shrek 2 took 10 million computer hours to generate its 92 minutes of CGI? Oh, you did. But did you know that a single frame of the city crowd scene took 35 hours to render? You knew that, too. Ah, but do you know – without sneaking a peek at the Factfile – how long it will take to animate the pages of a book magically turning over by themselves, in a manner similar to the opening sequence of the movie? Ah, you looked! That’s cheating.

Okay, take a sneak peek at step one; we won’t mind. Do you notice anything peculiar about it? That’s right. In the past, we’ve given you a project file to load in, but this time you’ve got nothing. Zilch. A big fat zero. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, in order to create a convincing page-turn, you need to create the book, too. Secondly, and more to the point, if we just told you how to create a page-turn, it wouldn’t be much of a Q&A, would it? Page-turns can be simple, a blendShape here, a nonlinear deformer there, but opening a book and having the pages seem to fall comfortably into place is another kettle of fish entirely. That’s why a page-turn really begins with the book.

In this Q&A, the book is going to be a combination of polygons and NURBS. The book cover needs to be bound to a skeleton so you can animate the spine bending. To keep the rigging to a minimum, we’ll use a polygon Smooth Proxy. This is useful, because you can also create clean UV maps for texturing. However, because you want smooth page-turns, the pages will be made from NURBS planes set above a fake block of pages. That way, you can increase their tessellation at render time. So all of these elements animate collectively, we’ll also create a single node to drive everything.

The final step is to create a double-sided shader so that each page can accept shading on either side. The support download contains a finished scene with a weathered leather book cover. Something that wouldn’t actually look out of place in a land far, far away. And speaking of far, far away, did you know that in the UK version of Shrek 2, the voice of the Ugly Sis… oh, what’s the point?

Click here to download the support files (~32MB)