Starship Troopers follows the adventures of its heroes as they battle the Arachnid Army, a vicious armada of insect warriors on planets across the Galaxy. Tippett Studio relied exclusively on computer graphic technologies to model, animate, light and composite 225 digital BUG shots, some with thousands of Bugs. The work of Tippett Studio has focused on character design and animation for the past 15 years. Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers marked the first, large-scale foray into all CG production. Our involvement came early in the development process, enabling us to design the creatures with the specific needs of the various sequences and actions in mind. By working closely with the director, we were able to focus the design of each of the bugs on the role it was to play in the eventual bug-army -infantry, artillery, bomber and commander. To pre-visualize the key sequences, animatics, or moving story-boards were executed in low-res form emphasizing the kinetic feel and pacing of the action.These would later serve as blueprints for finished sequences, as well as a concrete, visual reference for the actors and crew working on location.

Because the story called for huge swarms of bugs -sometimes thousands of creatures in frame at once - no type of animation was ignored. An all hands on deck methodology was adopted, with traditional stop-motion, motion-capture/puppetry,"traditional" key-frame CG animation, and procedural animation techniques all employed to finish the job. In situations where a great deal of control over an individual bug's timing and position was needed, key-frame style mouse and keyboard animation was the preferred method. Animators could do rough-blocking with "floating" hood-ornament style models to establish the basic paths and timing of small to medium size groups of bugs and then go in and refine individual bugs movements as required by the shot.

For shots that called for hundreds or thousands of bugs to swarm over the landscape, a procedural approach was used. We used Alias Wavefront's Dynamation to create particle systems that would swarm toward a particular goal, play, follow flow-fields set up by the animator. At this point each particle was treated as a sphere to ensure that no collisions occured, but it could still be computationally tractable. After the overall motion of the swarm was determined, animation was applied. Pre-animated animation cycles (run, walk, milling around etc.) were instantiated for each point in the swarm depending on the point's speed. We further manipulated the particle system so that individual bugs could be marked for special behavior such as falling down or getting shot on a particular key frame.