Computer Graphics World

n n n n CGI Desert Life "That was my challenge to the modeling su- pervisors at the beginning," Bielenberg says. "I told them to push the complexity of the models beyond what we had done before. My take on this is that we were holding back based on older practices of having to save disk space and being careful about lighting and rendering. We still have to be smart, but I believed we were holding back too much. The process could handle more complexity in our models and environments, especially for buildings and towns. It ended up being fine for lighting." Puss himself was the touchstone for the environments. He is a walking, talking cat. But even so, he's somewhat realistic, and the environment needed to be one in which he could exist. "We had a fair amount of realism," Bielenberg says. "But we pushed it more than we did for Shrek. If something was organic, we made it more organic. If it was lush, we made Stereo Clouds "We wanted to make a stereo 3D movie that was worth seeing in the theater," says director Chris Miller. "People pay a premium to see a stereo 3D movie, and we wanted to create an experience that you have to see in the theater." The beanstalk growing into the cloud world offered one of those experiences. "To be on the ride with the characters when the beanstalk takes off like a NASA rocket is explosive at first," Miller says. "Then we settle in for a romantic ride in the cloud layer. Then, we go through a torrential thunderstorm for a beat. Then, we're on the edge of the atmosphere. It's ethereal, dreamy. We see the aurora borealis. The stars turn into snow, and we have a whiteout. It's breathtaking. We have so many other opportunities, too." Miller cites a scene in which the characters ride back to earth from the clouds. "They don't go down the same way they went up," he says. "It's exhilarating." –Barbara Robertson 16 October/November 2011 At top, Richard Daskas, Dominique Louis, and Christian Schellewald created a digital painting of the growing beanstalk, which the CG department would later re-create. At right is the death progression illustrated by Woonyoung Jung. Later, the modeling, visual effects, and layout departments worked together to grow, surface, light, and film a procedural beanstalk through a series of shots. it more lush and saturated. Puss is in a Span- ish world, and we wanted to get the passion of Spain into our visuals. We strove to make the overall look vibrant and rich color-wise and shape-wise." After Puss leaves San Ricardo to escape from authorities (someone tricked him); to search for those magic beans, his journey takes him through various desert landscapes. To create these landscapes, the art department designed and built a rough model of a generic desert. Layout artists scouted locations in that desert and sent them to modeling for hero surfacing. "We went to cards and sprites in a few places, and in the foreground, sometimes we dressed the sets with hero high-resolution bushes, shrubs, and yucca plants," Bielenberg says. "But, for the most part, with the faster machines we have now and more storage, we could push through a large amount of geome- try, so we didn't need to do much level of detail with the environments." The modelers took Bielenberg's challenge to build complex models too far, though, with an unlikely object: a tumbleweed. "We put way too much detail in it and hadn't tested rendering before we scattered hundreds in the desert," Bielenberg says. "It was probably the single most complex thing we tried to render.

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