Togakure Ryu has not been completely designed or realised by myself. First I want to thank professor Juergen Schopper, who was mainly interested in developing and realising Togakure Ryu, not only commenced by the early tries of telling the story, but also the one that gave me the chance and the time to fulfill myself.

So let´s start with storyboarding. There were four versions of a storyboard, but only one story, that tell´s the adventure of a girl. Eventhough the characters had already been designed and modelled, it was still unknown how to let them act and react.
When you try to tell a CG-animated story, you can only work with the implements of a movie. So your modelled characters become to actors, your point of view becomes to the camera. And every camera and actor movement becomes to an essential viewport for your viewer. Good action movies get along without the usage of long discussions and explanations, but remain strong when you bring out the point why the hero of your story has to be punished or to pass an adventure.

All of the images, passes and scenes in Togakure Ryu´s title design are dark, dirty and stuffed with an elritch atmosphere. Not only the music but also the sounddesign did a great job to realise this. You know from the first second of the movie that something is going totaly wrong. In the postproduction process I made a bunch of adjustment layers to compound that feeling and of course to even unifiy the different scenes.

As I mentioned, you need actors, not only perfect modelled characters. So I made for every of the two main characters about 15 facial morph targets, an almost perfect bone rigging and skinning (took about 4 months), and in a final step the clothing (took about 2 months). We cannot talk about a complete modelling process inside of 3dsmax. Besides that I used even ZBrush, MAYA and POSER for example getting just the idea for perfect skinning or morph targeting.

A lot of character animation was done with Alias Motionbuilder and the FBX-Format and of course 3dsmax Character Studio. Really great tools that offer you the possibilty to import motion captured data. With Motionbuilder you can get even a step further and apply some desired keyframing on your mocap-data. So no use of reinvent the wheel for walkcycles. Some of the falldowns were captured with a Trial-Version of Endorphin.

Every scene got its own problems but also possibilites to show. Hair-dynamics, clothing, path- and camera-animation, individually interprated mocap-data, collisions, effects, alm.