Montreal, Quebec - For more than 20 years, Barcelona-based Cromosoma has been a leader in TV programming, particularly with 2D cartoons. Cromosoma produces children’s programming based on high-quality 2D animation becoming one of the top companies in the audio-visual sector in both Spain and Europe. Cromosoma’s team implemented a complete 3D animated production pipeline in Autodesk Maya. To achieve a traditional cartoon look Cromosoma employed Maya's powerful shader tree.
Cromosoma went into co-production with Pontas, Televisió de Catalunya, and Televisión Española to create Asha, a 3D TV series of 52 episodes of 13 minutes each. The series explores the multicultural world we live in through the eyes of a bright young girl name Asha and her adventures with her friends.
Óscar Márquez, coordinator of the 3D department explains, “We had to increase our deliverables by completing four 13 minutes episodes per month. After we updated our internal tools it was necessary to find a tool integrated in Maya to help us with the tedious work of lip sync so we could focus our energy on acting. Voice-O-Matic was that tool.”
Voice-O-Matic automates lip sync animations with any 3D character rig in any language and helps to reduce production time. Voice-O-Matic from Di-O-Matic is available as plug-in for Autodesk 3ds max, Autodesk Maya, and Autodesk Softimage.
Márquez and his team implemented Voice-O-Matic into their existing pipeline. “We had already done 10 episodes manually before we started using Voice-O-Matic and it was very easy to integrate into our pipeline." Willy Nuez, IT manager reveals.
Márquez concludes, "Not only did we manage to increase our productivity, but it allowed us to focus on other aspects of the series to improve the final product. What we liked most about Voice-O-Matic is that it can be set up easily, the lip sync of several characters can be done at the same time and we barely need to modify the animation curves. If you make a good setup and integrate it properly you can have very good results. With Voice-O-Matic, we could do all the lip sync we needed in the series with just 10 mouth shapes and only one control for the most extreme poses.”