Scooby snacks for CGI team

For the first-ever live-action adaptation of cartoon icon 'Scooby-Doo', the film's producers brought the characteristics of the animated pooch into a new dimension though the use of state-of-the-art computer generated imagery (CGI).
To protect the integrity of the cartoon while composing Scooby-Doo, visual effects surpervisor Peter Crosman and his Visual Effects team endeavored to hybridize the characteristics of a real Great Dane with the cartoon dog. Visual effect house Rhythm and Hues created a biological Scooby: his bones, muscles, eye color, and ears, retaining his inherent color, as well as the tell-tale spots on his body, his bent ear and elongated walk.
Mr Crosman said: "Scooby is the central character in the movie and a large amount of the inertia, the thrust of the movie, is born out of his look and mannerisms. A full palette of CGI options is a virtually limitless way for us to create Scooby's persona, allowing us to infuse him with his cartoon characteristics – especially his facial expressions, his jaw structure and smile and still make him look realistic."
From the beginning of production, director Raja Gosnell emphasized that the 3-D star of the film must be both believable and true to character.
"Scooby has to walk and talk and interact with his human co-stars and perform other humanistic actions, but at the end of the day, he must feel like a real dog and also exhibit all the charm, humour and mannerisms that we associate with Scooby-Doo," said Mr Crosman.
The Visual Effects team then used story-boarded concepts for the superhound's scenes as guidelines to complete each phase of the CGI process.
Backgrounds for the scenes were filmed; then reference points for Scooby were inserted into the shots and temporary animation 'dropped in'. After each sequence was approved, the VFX artists generated a final rendering with the appropriate verisimilitude of fur, eyes, positioning of the tongue, etc. for an accurate multi-textured creation of the three-dimensional Scooby-Doo.
To help the actors working with Scooby, as well as for use as a reference point for the digital imaging team and the computer generated effects to come, John Cox and his crew at the Creature Workshop created two full-size, three-dimensional Scooby-Doo models as stand-ins.