Asterix was the first movie I have worked on. It has been a pleasure to work on that movie, because there was a lot of FX shots, and various things to do. An elephant, spiders, romans soldiers who were flying everywhere, and a magic potion, and many others... As I've been hired to do the shading and lighting on that film, Duboi in February 1998, sent me to Munich where the circus sequence was shot. I had to take a lot of pictures of the elephant, and observe... (that's actually what I did during 3 days) Then, back in Paris, the pictures were scanned, and I used them as projections mapped on the 3d model of the elephant. Once projected in Maya, I have exported them to a 3d paint software to make the skin match. The elephant was mapped with 2 high-res images: one for the (half) body, and another one for the head (cause we've had a very close shot of the head, but finally cutted by the director) The maps were about 4k, in color and bump. Here are some samples of the circus shots, where the elephant is held by Obelix, and sticked to the ground with its tusks This shot was particularly difficult, because it was a close shot of the elephant. As the elephant is held by Obelix, its butt comes very close to the camera, and we had to see every detail of the skin. For the animation, Christophe Petit was the man of the situation. He modeled entirely the elephant in NURBS, did the skinning, and used the dynamics to get a realistic skin behavior. Now you can see clearly the strongest man in Gaule in action, helding with his own hands the big elephant. The dress with the picks on the back of the elephant was very hard to do. More than 40 picks were used and 'sticked' to the dress. Each girth is modeled and constrained to its pick. All is animated with dynamics. I also added some dust with harware particles when the elephant whipped the ground with its trunk.   The spiders shots: two different models of spiders were used. One very light for the large den shots, and one heavy NURBS model for the close shots. During the circus sequence, Asterix has to cross a spider's den. So Stephane Deverly from the R&D dept of Duboi has developped a little crowd software (Delafoule (c) Duboi)) to multiply the number of whatever object you want. We could place spiders in a predefined den, and the software automatically added more and more spiders until the den is filled, calculating their trajectories, and even made the spiders climb on other ones when they had to. Another problem on this shot was when Asterix enters in the den. All the spiders climb on him, and he finally disappears. The animation has been done using once again dynamics + home-made crowd software. On the image below, Asterix has just come out from the den, hundreds (and I mean it) of spiders all over his body. For that shot, we had to rotoscop Asterix (Christian Clavier), then stick each spider to the model, and animate them one by one. All the spiders on the body of Asterix are keyframed.   The following images are for a very close shot of Asterix with spiders on his face. This actually is the most disgusting shot of the movie. A spider has entered in the mouth of Asterix!! Ok come on, do you swallow or do you spit it??   The flying soldiers: For those shots, real stunts have been 'mocaped'. Then during pre-prod, all the anims were stored in banks to re-use them as we wanted. The soldier in the foreground is a real shot stunt, only the background is 3d. Ok, this is it for Asterix & Obelix. I don't remember the statistics for that productions (number of cpus, RAM total amount, ...) but it's huge (you can also visit the DUBOI web site www.duboi.com to have these informations (All shots created and rendered with Maya 1.0)