3D World’s question of the month – “How can I create an animated book like the one in Shrek 2?”
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.
“How can I create an animated book like the one in Shrek 2?” (tutorial and source files included)
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