Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1058642
F E A T U R E e d i t i o n 4 , 2 0 1 8 | c g w 9 idea of what he would look like but realized he's more of a concept than a character. He's not a stable being: He continuously changes. He's different in every shot. He could be whatever he liked. He can walk through a tree, so we had to work out how the volume would stay. In some scenes, his ears disappear and reappear. His shoulders become part of his neck." His default was a bipedal character with a tail, but his shape changed as required. At first, modelers built a detailed creature with thin legs like a mouse, an inner core filled with mice, and mice on the surface. The team simplified that model and made his legs feel like they were strong enough to support his weight. "Animators had a base mesh and a base rig they could use to animate him," Clegg says. "It was flexible and stretchy, so they could build different shapes. They'd focus on the shape and form, on action points for the character through the scene. In one shot, he engulfs the tin soldiers. In another, he picks up Clara." For motion, the animators referenced the dancer Lil Buck (Charles Riley), who performs a street-dance style called "Memphis jookin" that originated 30 years ago. The film's production notes quote Riley describing the dance thusly: "It used to be called the gangster walk. It was really simple, but it has evolved into complex movement with intri- cate footwork. It's like Michael Jackson times 10: There are slides and glides and fun toe spins, ticking and pushing of the feet, and the shoulder bounce. It's all about the bounce." As Mouse King glides along, mice contin- uously run up his legs to his head, fall off, and climb back on. "He isn't a solid object," Clegg says. "He's an amorphous turbulent thing, a pile of mice moving around. Animators used Lil Buck's performance as inspiration to create a base action, and they would apply simulations to make him more fluid." First, they ran a cloth simulation on the mesh driven by animation parameters that gave him what Clegg describes as a thick, syrupy movement. "It's like a custard that managed to stand up," he says. Then, they applied a crowd simulation on top that was driven by the performance speed and directed by guide passes and curves on the cloth-simulated surface. Falling mice became rigid bodies, and rag- doll physical simulations took over. Once a mouse landed, it jumped back onto the Mouse King and ran back up as if it were on a conveyor belt. "We had paths with offsets so the motion looked chaotic," Clegg says. "The mice all had different levels of detail depending on how close they are to camera." The team used Maya for animation, rigging, and cloth simulation, then fed the mesh into Houdini for the crowd simulation using mice instanced onto the surface. "We then exported the result into our crowd format and rendered with RIS through [Foundry's] Katana," Clegg says. MOUSERINKS In the film, the character Mouserinks con- trols the 60,000 mice tumbling along in the Mouse King. He works for Mother Ginger, and he's the mouse that stole Clara's key. Is he a villain? That remains to be seen. On set, he was sometimes a gray, 3D-printed mouse and sometimes a stuffy. In the film, he's CG. "He's a mischievous mouse, bigger than an actual mouse," Clegg says. "He spends a lot of time on shoulders and hands. We treated him as a standard digital character. The challenge was in figuring out how mouse-like he should be. The directors wanted him to be cute and fun, but not overly done." MOTHER GINGER Although inspired by a character from the ballet, Mother Ginger is quite different from the ballet character whose little ginger- bread children emerge from a giant ginger- bread-house skirt, and dance. In this film, Mother Ginger has been banished from the realms and become regent of the Fourth Realm. She appears as a terrifying 40-foot- tall giant with a 30-foot-wide circus-tent skirt. But appearances are deceiving: The giant is a marionette. Mother Ginger (Helen Mirren) is actually the puppeteer inside. FLOWERS SWEETS Land of Land of More than two million individual CG flowers and foliage adorn everything in this agrarian realm – fields, windmills, and houses. Artists at MPC created the digital fantasy world with CG windmills, cobbled streets, and fairy-tale buildings. Like the Lands of Snow- flakes and Sweets, this realm is 100 percent digital. Captain Phillip (Jayden Fowora-Knight), the only nutcracker in the four realms, is the regent of the Land of Flowers and also guards the border between the real world and the realms. Dancing CG gingerbread men live in this delicious, boldly-colored realm with gumdrop décor, candy cane trees, and chocolate ground. "It's a vibrant CG land that we see from land and air," says Max Wood, visual effects supervisor. "It is full of oversized candy and houses made of ginger- bread, Victorian sweets, and caster sugar roofs." The Sugar Plum Fairy (Keira Knightley) rules the Land of Sweets. MOTHER GINGER