Computer Graphics World

n n n n CGI creepy bald person. So, we'd aim down the middle until we'd get a big grin with his eyes popped open that felt right. Humpty isn't the hero. But, if he doesn't hold up his end, the movie falls apart." And all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put the movie together again? "He keeps the quiet drumbeat going," Loof- bourrow says. Kitty, on the other hand, takes her cues and her rigging from Puss. "She complements him," Loofbourrow says. "We used roughly the same rig, but female leads are always hard—and Kitty was no exception. We want- ed her to be intelligent and attractive, but she couldn't dominate Puss. And the cats could never feel little, like they could be crushed by humans." At top, animators who performed Puss and Kitty needed to create quiet moments filled with intense facial expressions. At bottom, Humpty, on the other hand, called for a broader style of animation. (Billy Bob Thornton) and Jill (Amy Sedaris). Also, as was true for Shrek, other familiar fairy- tale characters make an appearance. "All new," Miller says, "none of the same characters we saw in Shrek." Here Kitty, Kitty To organize the work on the show and distrib- ute it among the 60 or so animators, Miller assigned lead supervisors to specific characters. "I think it made things a little complicated," he says, "because things came in pieces from a dozen sequences at a time. But I think it was so worthwhile because we had such great con- sistency within sequences." When two characters interacted in complex shots, two animators worked on the shot, but usually the person whose character was most prominent in the shot created the entire thing, including the other characters. "It wasn't an easy film to animate," Miller says. "When you have a strongly caricatured character with broad animation, it's easy to zero in on that. The characters are not photo- real, but they aren't hyper-caricatured either." Thus, the animators who had most recently been working on How to Train Your Dragon and Megamind, both of which had broad ani- mation styles, needed time to adjust. "It takes 12 October/November 2011 a little while to shake that style out of your system," Miller says. "The approach on Puss is so different. It's quieter. When it is broad, it is for effect. Kitty was the same way. Their movements are subtle, and they are quiet a lot of the time, acting only with facial expressions. It didn't take the animators long to adjust, but I think when they got a Humpty shot, they were probably excited. They could loosen up a bit." With Humpty, the animators could have fun with the way he moved, the physical com- edy. Humpty's challenge was that he couldn't look like a guy in a suit with a rubber mask; his face needed to feel hard. "He's a character who is all face," says Na- than Loofbourrow, character TD supervisor. "There's a lot going on in his head, and you can read everything on his face. But, he couldn't feel like a human face talking through an egg." The character TDs, modelers, and anima- tors spent approximately a year and a quarter in look development before they found the right combination of movement and expres- sions. "We'd tread a careful line in terms of rigging and look," Loofbourrow says. "If we made him look too much like an eggshell, you wouldn't expect him to move and stretch. But, if we made him too fleshy, he looked like a Smoosh Many of the humans live in San Ricardo, Puss's home village, which has 120 residents— including some thieves who hang out in the bar. The small number of crowd characters allowed the teams to make more interesting characters than the typical generic humans. "We wanted craggy, interesting faces, like in a Sergio Leone film," Loofbourrow says. "I think of them as having 'half-hero' faces. We didn't put the same amount of time we'd put into a hero, but we made unique characters." The differences were primarily in the faces, as Loofbourrow mentions, and in their cos- tumes. For cloth simulation, the crew used a combination of in-house tools and off-the- shelf software. "We can warp clothing so that it looks like it moves, but for the most part, we simulated the cloth," says Ken Bielenberg, visual effects supervisor. All told, the team created approximately 30 different types of men, 20 women, and 12 children. By modifying hairstyles, eye color, and costumes, the designers could easily create a catalog of thousands. "The art department wanted to specifically pick out the ones they wanted to feature, though," Loofbourrow says. "We made some choices about how to model the faces and bodies so we could adopt new faces and quickly apply the rig and do touch- ups to adjust the faces." Although Puss was a character in Shrek 2, Shrek the Third, and Shrek Forever After, the character TDs did not reprise his two-year- old rig for his starring role. "Animators need to give a hero character a more expressive per- formance," Loofbourrow says. "They ask for subtle things, for extra levels of controls." Puss also spent time in the grooming salon getting a hair transplant. "He has more hair

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