MPC

Animating Groot: Greg Fisher

Animation supervisor MPC

MPC studios were given the project to animate Groot in act 1 and Rocket in act 3, with a hell of a lot in between! the subjects were shared with a different studio, so they were in constant communication, sharing ideas and files with each other to achieve the best they could! this gave me an insight as to the workings in different environments, that if I was in an animation studio, I should expect to be working not just with my own crew but with other studios as well.

So here is the run down of the shots that MPC were involved in:

857 Shots in total

(1305 with omits: shots you discard)

490 Shots of the final battle

180 Shots of Rocket

170 Shots of Groot

This is an incredible work load for the company so everyone was up to their ears with work, but it was extraordinary to see how they achieved these results, especially for Groot, how each vine moved in reaction to the others, which was achieved by animating in sections, maybe using constraints to have a flow of animation.

a common hurdle when it comes to feature length animations is the time-scale of the renders. for example, in the Guardians of the Galaxy, the final scene had the city as the environment that contained 39 Billion polygons ... which made the render times range from 6 - 16 hours ... per frame. this is common as I have researched into it before. it just makes you take into account extra time for renders.