From Softimage Customer Stories, Issue 6, 2002

MISSION TO MARS: David Rowntree Keeps the Beat at Nanomation
By Michael Abraham

Ask David Rowntree, founder of Nanomation, an animation house in London’s West End, about his background and you may be surprised by his answer. “I started out as a programmer and I’ve been doing computer animation for about five years now, using various packages,” Rowntree explains. “To pass the time at my other job, I started bringing my laptop with me and began playing around with animation. I originally got involved using Povray, a freeware ray tracer. That’s really where I got hooked. That tied my interest in animation and my computer expertise together when I was waiting around for the music to start.”

Rowntree’s “other” job turns out to be drumming and percussion for the popular BritPop (or “alternative,” if you happen to live on the other side of the ocean) band Blur. The four member band has been together for over a dozen years now, producing six very well-received albums in that time. Rowntree is – you guessed it – the one with the sticks and the skins. He is also the one with the computer science training and a two-year-old, two-person animation company.

What began as a way to kill time has since yielded a whole new business. Rowntree now shares the Nanomation offices in London’s West End with cartoonist and animator Tamsin Nunley, who joined the company a little over a year ago, and creates for clients such as MTV, Channel Four, I-GIG.com and, most recently, the Open University.

“I’d have to say the Open University project has been the most fun,” says Rowntree matter-of-factly. “We’ve been working on what is known as Beagle 2, which involves a distinctly British mission to the planet Mars. We’ve spent the last six months or so modeling and animating a Mars lander for them, as well as creating character animations that we hope will get kids talking about and interested in the project. It’s been good fun, and without too much pressure.”

Not too much pressure, perhaps, but still some significant challenges. Requiring both a whimsical character animation and seamless integration with much more technical, photorealistic background plates, Nanomation’s work on Beagle 2 actually began in SOFTIMAGE®|3D.

“The idea of the piece was that the character animation fits into the technical animation, which had ships flying through space and that kind of thing,” says Rowntree. “We started out using SOFTIMAGE|3D v. 3.9, but we eventually transferred everything to SOFTIMAGE®|XSI™, primarily so we could use the Animation Mixer.”

Changing systems in mid-project takes courage at the best of times, but Rowntree admits that the combination of the project’s flexible deadline and the challenge of learning a new system proved too much to deny. “We were used to modeling and animating in SOFTIMAGE|3D, but the lure of SOFTIMAGE|XSI was more than we could resist,” he says. “I was very keen to explore the Animation Mixer. That feature alone meant you could set up animation cycles and reuse them, so there would be less time spent animating. We had already effectively finished the modeling in SOFTIMAGE|3D, so we were able to go straight to the animation module in the new software. It was brave, I suppose, to go to the new software in the middle of a project, but sometimes the best things happen when you’re a little bit naïve going in.”

Still, Rowntree and Nunley say they picked up on SOFTIMAGE|XSI’s unique workflow fairly easily, even when a new wrinkle, interestingly involving Rowntree’s “other” life, was added to the project.

The original scenario went a little something like this. A rather technical, animated scene (created by another company) reveals the Mars Express, an orbiter of the red planet, arriving in the Mars orbit and jettisoning the Beagle 2 lander. The lander descends through the atmosphere, deploys parachutes and lands softly on the surface. Once it has touched down, the lander sends a signal back to earth, which turns out to be an early Blur tune entitled “Far Out.” As it turns out, however, the Open University wanted more than just the tune.

“The project team thought it would be fun to create a ‘quick’ animation of the band leaping out of Beagle 2 as soon as it lands and plays our song,” says Rowntree with a laugh. “Of course, there’s really no such thing as a ‘quick’ animation, and animations of four people is quite a task for just two artists. That was pretty challenging, but we got it done. More recently, we have taken over the technical animation work from the previous company, and are now modeling and animating the technical sequence again in SOFTIMAGE|XSI incorporating all the changes to the mission.”

Rowntree continues: “We also write our own software,” he explains. “We have integrated a number of them with SOFTIMAGE|XSI. That probably makes us the first people in this country to do so. I’ve come up through the ranks of animation software packages, from freeware through almost all the others, and I really didn’t find anything that was even satisfactory for character animation until SOFTIMAGE|3D and now, SOFTIMAGE|XSI. It seems to have character animation in mind from the start, and that saves a great deal of time.”

As that future unfolds, Rowntree will remain thankful that SOFTIMAGE|XSI functions easily on his laptop, giving him something to do during those long waits with the band. Asked if he anticipates forgoing those long waits anytime soon, Rowntree is emphatic. “Never!” he says with a smile. “We’ll keep making music from the grave.”

Somebody had better make sure that coffin has a USB port.