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j u ly • a u g u s t • s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 1 c g w 2 1 3D with a Twist mouth shapes that can be especially small or large. To get the consistent round corners of the mouth, though, required new rigging. "To be more illustrative, we had to come up with new controls, particularly with this design language that Enrico wanted, and to be able to move the mouth all over the face and go into profile," Venturini says, noting there are 221 and 223 individual controls in Luca's and Alberto's mouths, respectively, to help animators create the rounded mouth expressions used throughout the film. "Most of our characters in an average Pixar film have a narrower range of movement, so the rigging doesn't have to be as robust or ver- satile. Immediately when we started to do some of our early animation tests, we were just breaking the technology that we had out of the gate. Then we started building the new pieces that we would need in keeping with the design language." Typically, the animators avoid having characters move into profile, but on Luca they embraced it, focusing a lot on the silhouette and design of the poses. Here, the silhouette is clean and round. There is not a lot of anato- my; the designs are simple, bold, and graphic. So they would not break the silhouette when the character is in profile, the artists would turn the head while keeping the mouth inside the silhouette and then popping it into the profile. Custom controls and sculpting let the artists adjust the silhouettes, profiles, and the shape of the mouth and the eyes to allow for the desired versatility. "It was more like a hand-drawn quality in 3D because we were literally sculpting in space with the camera," adds Skaria. With the squash-and-stretch style came some fun design departures, including some multi-limb animation, popular in the 2D world, to illustrate fast action. This was done using a variation of the transformation rig, only in these instances it used two human rigs, for example, as opposed to a human and sea monster rig. Water Craft With a film set in a seaside town and with a cast that includes sea creatures, you know there is CG water, and lots of it. Jon Reisch, effects supervisor, recalls looking at the storyboards two years ago and seeing "hun- dreds and hundreds of shots in Luca that involved water" — the sea in the background, the Portorosso harbor, the boys splashing in and out of the water, and more. While Pixar's tool set has become better and better at capturing realism when it comes to water, for this film, the focus was on stylization and playfulness, thus requiring the team to push their tools in a totally different direction in order to achieve more controllable and designable water. First, they focused on the color of the wa- ter, with all the beautiful blues and greens, driven through volumetrics underneath the surface. The goal was to make this water feel like it is from the Mediterranean as op- posed to some tropical setting. "Volumetrics is one of the cornerstone building blocks we use in the effects department, typically for clouds, smoke, or explosions. But it turns out that the way light interacts with the water when it passes through the volume of the water in the Mediterranean Sea and in the ocean, it scatters and has similar properties to the way the light scatters around in a cloud," explains Reisch. Second, the effects department pushed the stylization of the ocean The sea monsters appear more creature-like than human as they swim.