This month, eyeon Software had the opportunity to catch up with Nicolas Valencia of Odeon Film Studio. OFS has a tremendous portfolio
including numerous commercial spots seen throughout Europe. The below interview focuses on a recent animation test for an upcoming
production. Nicolas provides some valuable insight about Digital Fusion within a 3D animation, and the invaluable benefits
of 2D to any production.
Click here to view the animation. 
(Quicktime format, 3.5 Mb)
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| eyeon: Why did you pursue this animated short? |
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It’s actually an interesting story, one of our customers was looking for an animation style that closely resembled Shrek. We decided the
best way to answer his questions was to produce an animated short.
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| eyeon: What facility do you work for and what is your role? |
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I work for Odeon Film Studio in Warsaw, Poland. I am the 3D/fx director and an animator. Together with three other great animators, Pawel
Tybora, Pawel Krawczyk and Alan Shamsudin we focus on animation projects for both TV and feature film. We all have extensive industry
experience and we’ve been working independently for years as 3d/2d animators, but as a team we achieve much better results.
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| eyeon: Where did you first hear about Digital Fusion and how long have you been using DF? |
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My DF adventure began in about 1998. I started using Fusion for music-video compositions, then advertisements and nowadays more often for movie
works.
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| eyeon: You work with both 3D and 2D apps. We know that you use Digital Fusion for compositing, what
3D package do you use and how is the integration between DF and that package? |
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We use mainly Lightwave3D and Softimage XSI, but you can also find us using 3DStudioMax and Maya at times. Integration is pretty comfy. We
use RLA, RPF, PSD and exported buffers. We are currently testing Gaia to do that for us 3D import and Krokodove VectorBlur works great with
RPF velocity data.
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| eyeon: What do you find most useful about Digital Fusion? |
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DF’s fundamental tools give us tones of possibilities. The workspace is intuitive, and the overall program works very fast. We find the Material
Object Buffer option to be very useful. Recently we’ve been working more and more with UV data from RPF. The Particle system is great. Plugin
sets like Krokodove and SpeedSix are a perfect supplement, making DF’s toolset even more powerful. I’ve got to admit that we often do Photoshop
work directly in Digital Fusion :)
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| eyeon: What unique compositing related issues/problems came up during production? |
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We used to have quite enough troubles with animation, but I don`t remember any with DF :)
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| eyeon: What else have you worked on in the past? |
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All projects are composited in DF of course :)
At the moment we [me and Tomek Niedzwiedz from Badi Badi Studio] are trying complete a simple series for a children show called "Box & Ball"
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If you have completed an interesting project and would like to share it with the DF community, please contact us
at  dfartist@eyeonline.com
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