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www.postmagazine.com 40 POST MAR/APR 2019 HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON to 65,000 in all), with different looks, different flying styles, different gaits and different ways of spewing fire. In the first film, the group was limited to no more than eight dragons in a single shot or the system could crash. Here, in a shot within the Hidden World, the team pushed that to approxi- mately 42,000 dragons. In the previous films, we were introduced to a wide variety of dragons, including Deadly Nadders, Gronckles, Rumblehorns, Hideous Zipplebacks, Terrible Terrors and more. Joining them for this release are four new types of dragons: the Deathgripper, the Hobglobber, the Goregutter and, of course, the white Fury. One of the more difficult dragons to animate was the Deathgripper, which has a claw-like leg, resulting in an unusual gait. It and the other characters were animated using the studio's Premo software. But, the most technically challenging dragon overall was Light Fury. ALL THAT GLITTERS All-black and all-white characters are notoriously difficult when it comes to animation because detail is often lost in the dark, monocolored coat, while it is accentuated in the white coat. In The Hidden World, we have the return of the lead dragon, the all-black Toothless, along with the new all-white Light Fury. "We struggled to make her look appeal- ing. We found that if we put too much detail into her, she went lizard very quickly," says Walvoord. "If we had too little detail, then she didn't match Toothless. So, we played with a lot of patterning. We eventually hit upon this idea of shimmer, like you see in eye makeup, to give her this glittery quality." But on the dragon, adding glitter on her eyes didn't quite work like it might on a human. "It looked like we were trying too hard," Walvoord adds. "It looked like she was wearing a lot of makeup. It was a bit over the top and not very appealing." Instead, the group added a subtle stripe pattern — one that Toothless has as well but is much more subtle. Then they reinforced that stripe pattern with the shimmer, which provided a strong visual level of detail that could be downplayed easily in close-ups. "In fact, visually, when Light Fury is really close to the camera, you see glitter but not the stripes. But then as she recedes farther away, suddenly you can see how all those bits of glitter reinforce the stripes, and they turn into a stripe pattern," Walvoord ex- plains. "It really helped us balance how much detail is appropriate. We can make her soft in close-ups, but then have more visual interest when [she is] farther away and sitting next to Toothless." Animating Light Fury was just as challenging as finding the desired aesthetic. "Obviously, she is an important character, and we had to find a way to make her look wild. But at the same time, she had to be incredibly charming and appealing, with a little bit — well, with a lot — of attitude," says Walvoord. "She had a lot of dimensions to her personality, and it took us a while to find them." The dragons do not speak, says DeBlois, so the animators had to be sure the animation spoke for them. All the dragons exhibit some type of animal influence in their personalities and the way they move. For Stormfly, a chicken; Cloudjumper, an owl. For Toothless, that ranged from horses, to dogs and other domesticated animals. Since Light Fury is a variant of Toothless' species, there had to be sim- ilarities, and the animators leaned toward big cats to exude confidence, elegance and aggression. Just nothing too anthropomorphic. "You're 100 percent reliant on the glance, posture, eyes and reaction in the body," says DeBlois. THE HIDDEN WORLD As far as the environments, there are a few new loca- tions in this installment, but the most impressive, by far, is the Hidden World of the Caldera — an expan- sive, wondrous home to dragons accessed through an underground volcano. It comprises a network of chambers and tunnels that wrap around the Earth, with cascading waterfalls and glowing foliage. In designing this unique world, the artists refer- enced nature. Walvoord points to a cave in Mexico that had been flooded for many years; when it was drained, there were huge crystals that had formed. "It was a foreign-looking landscape that existed underground," he says. "And that became the basis for our Hidden World." As Walvoord points out, there are lots of huge crystals at odd angles spaced throughout the world that form pillars, around which the rest of the world is built. The crystals serve a dual purpose: as a design element and a practical element (a light source that illuminates the space). "It was important to Dean [DeBlois] that this feel like we're under- ground. And yet, we couldn't make it feel like a cave, that the dragons just live in this rock in the ground. It needed to feel natural, amazing — as if they were living above ground." In addition to the crystals, the artists decorated the space with elements that do not need a lot of light, such as corals and mushrooms, and then combined them in unexpected ways to turn this into a "completely foreign-looking landscape," Walvoord says. "But at the same time, it is completely ground- ed in what actually exists in the real world." MOONRAY On the tech side, DreamWorks' new MoonRay renderer had the greatest impact across this film, turning the Hidden World into an enchanting paradise and filling the shots with thousands of unique dragons. For far too long, says DeBlois, lighting has been the bottleneck that restricted the ambition of ani- mated films. "Now, we have a powerful tool at the back end that allows us to deliver on the promise of huge worlds full of lush, beautiful settings and many more fully formed characters than we've ever been able to render," he notes. "What once required starting anew every time a shot was delivered, is now significantly streamlined. It's astonishing what it has freed us up to do." MoonRay, a ray tracer, is a physical-based ren- derer (PBR) that calculates light and shadows as they are in the real world, making details sharper than ever. It replaces the studio's previous renderer, MoonLight, a scan-line renderer that used a point- based global illumination system. As Walvoord points out, just because someone is using a ray tracer doesn't mean they are doing physically-based rendering. There are many ani- mated movies that do not. "It was clear that for us, it was a good choice," he says. However, the results were not immediate. "When we started work- MoonRay enabled artists to populate the world with lots of characters. Hiccup and Astrid.