Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1399888
52 cgw j u ly • a u g u s t • s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 1 prietary – one that resulted in much faster rigs, and the other, blazing-fast personalized rendering – as being total game changers for the production. Nearly all the animals in the film, including the main CG characters, are covered in be- lievable fur, a process the artists enhanced for this show. The studio's ALFRO grooming tool, which has been developed over a few different movies, was used to add millions of hairs to each character. For example, Peter has 4,330,497 hairs in his groom, each with 10 points (along with 12,113 guide hairs). Of course, CG hair and fur are very compute-intensive. "This process was a big deal for us in animation; with fur covering the characters' entire bodies, you lose a lot of the information in the faces between the bald rabbit you see in the Maya viewport, compared to what you see rendered with fur," says Pickard. Due to developments in Glimpse for faster, more efficient rendering and ALFRO for the grooming, the artists and anima- tors were able to take advantage of a new system called Anim Custom Renders, which enabled individuals to kick off personalized renders via a tool from their own workstation and get them back in a mere 15 to 20 min- utes, to see how their work was progressing, thus enabling them to iterate faster. According to Pickard, they were able to isolate portions of a shot they were working on by defining which characters needed to be rendered and what frame range should be used. This was especially helpful, he says, when working on facial expression, as the bodies and faces of the animals were covered in fur. On another level, these automated ren- ders, known as Renderboys, also helped the director to confidently review shots. Although the results are not equivalent to final renders, the quality is quite high, as it is rendered with HDRI, motion blur, and fur. "It's a tremendous improvement over trying to use a grayscale OpenGL type of render to review complex emotional shots," Pickard adds. Unlike real rabbits, the bunnies in Peter Rabbit are wearing clothing, such as jackets. The cloth was oen highly automated using a system called AnimCFX. which Middle- ton and Miles Green's character effects team developed. Each item of clothing was designed and built in Marvelous Designer by the assets team. The garments were then tested by the character effects team using a moving character to ensure that they fit properly. The team would then build a Houdini-based cloth rig for each character, which could be fed into a Renderboy. Ani- mators were able to check in a shot at night and by the following morning, could see the characters lit, with great quality fur, motion blur, and shadows, integrated into the plates with a cloth simulation over the top. However, the automated cloth did not work for every shot. For more complicated or technical shots, character animation worked closely with the character effects team, which did custom per-shot adjust- ments so that when they ran a Renderboy, it would pick up the new custom shot settings. This was particularly useful in instances when story or edit would require an adjustment to animation, but would pick up a cloth rig without having to go back into character effects. Hippity Hop As Pickard points out, the resting behavior of Peter and his friends was just as important as the bigger movements – the way they breathe, twitch their ears, and so forth. Of course, rabbits are known for their twitchy noses, but animation tests during the first film found that these types of actions could be distracting, especially as these characters have some human aspects. "You want to believe that these characters can speak and emote. Having a constantly twitching nose in the center of the face was quite distract- ing," he notes. Yet, they are rabbits, aer all. So, in a shot where the characters are observing or in the background, animators added more of a twitching. But when the animals were talking to each other, for example, the motion was toned down. "When they are moving from point A to B, you can see little ear twitch- es and things, which adds to the sense of realism that Will Gluck was aiming for. We were treading this line between actual rabbit behavior and anthropomorphic human per- formance. Sometimes they are viewed one way and other times the other way; it just depended on what they were doing or who they were interacting with, and how they were meant to be emoting in the shot – and we modulated accordingly," says Pickard. Key to having the rabbits feel like actual animals but also like talking, thinking charac- ters was in the way they walked – at times upright and other times on all fours. For in- stance, if they moved more than a couple of steps, the animators would drop them down into quadruped mode. When they would talk amongst themselves or interact with some- Each clothing item was designed and built in Marvelous Designer, and the cloth highly automated using AnimCFX.