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j a n u a r y . f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 6 c g w 4 3 at Assemblage in India, and a smaller portion was done at a studio in China (GDC's Institute of Digital Media Technology). Postproduction work, mean- while, was completed at Splash. "I would check in with the an- imators in India and China every week to talk about a scene, and they would model the charac- ters and backgrounds, and push that through from layout to final color," says Wall. Arnaud Mathieu started out as animation supervisor, over- seeing the work at Assemblage; later, his role shied to assistant director. Working in vastly different time zones made Norm a 24-hour-a-day job for Wall and the others involved. Most of the communication was done via Skype, and dailies were sent each day. The groups also used The Foundry's Hiero shot man- agement, conform, edit, and review solution extensively, for basic editing and shot review, "which considerably smoothed the follow-up on the shot ver- sioning," says Mathieu. W H A T A C H A R A C T E R ! Norm is a polar bear with a big personality. But he is complex in other, more technical ways. He has the ability to walk on two legs when taking on human at- tributes, such as dancing, and of course, embarking on his NYC adventure. When he is in polar bear mode, he is a quadruped, such as in scenes where he is interacting with his father. In addition, Norm is cov- ered in thick, white fur. In fact, a number of the characters in Norm are furred creatures, including Norm's sidekicks, a trio of lemmings, as well as caribou and other lemmings. To handle the fur, the Assemblage artists used Joe Alter's Shave and A Haircut hair modeling and animation soware. Norm had roughly 1.5 million hairs. If this wasn't complicated enough, he was oen wearing clothes or interacting with props. In a storm sequence, the fur was wet, presenting a sep- arate challenge. As a result, the character had various grooming requirements, depending on the situation and scene. The number of furred characters in a particular scene affected how the shot was ren- dered. At times, the crew used cloud rendering, giving them access to several thousand render blades. "We also created simpler shaders to imitate the fur for background characters in some of the shots of the Norm crowning sequence with all the furry characters in the cavern," says Mathieu. The evil villain, Mr. Greene, meanwhile, is a new-age ex- ecutive-turned-guru with long charcoal hair. Animators gave him a lot of cartoony squash- and-stretch capabilities, with extreme poses, antics, expres- sions, and so forth. Assemblage created these models using an Autodesk Ma- ya-based pipeline. Animation was done in Maya, as was the lighting. Maya's built-in Arnold (from Solid Angle) was used for rendering, while The Foundry's Mari was employed for textur- ing and the company's Nuke for compositing. On the hardware side, Assemblage used dual-Xeon workstations with 32 gb of RAM and Nvidia graphic cards. The network architecture at the stu- dio relied on Isilon storage, which offered efficiency and stability. Some scenes even required crowd control – to handle the mobs of people and the heavy car traffic in NYC, for instance. This was done with Golaem Crowd simulation soware that's built into Maya. "The extensive use of crowds in NYC pushed us to find dif- ferent solutions for the dancing sequence in the city, without compromising the quality. For example, lots of animation cycles were generated to fit the mood of the crowd at different parts of the plaza sequence. We sent the cycles to Golaem, which handled the crowd on a shot basis," explains Mathieu. "This gave us the flexibility to ar- range the crowd per the artistic requirements." However, the animators, working in tandem with the di- rector and the crowd VFX team at Assemblage, had to change a few camera movements and framings in the sequence so the shots could be delivered on time. E N V I R O N M E N T A L C O N C E R N S Norm contains a wide assort- ment of environments and backdrops, including various lo- cations in the Arctic (Pride Ice, Grandpa's land, and the shore, to name a few) and in New York City (such as Times Square, Greene Square, the warehouse, Mr. Greene's building, various streets, and more). Altogether, (LEFT TO RIGHT) SQUASH AND STRETCH WAS USED FOR THE EVIL DEVELOPER. OTHER CHARACTERS, LIKE THE LEMMINGS, NEEDED FUR.