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ANIMATION www.postmagazine.com 11 POST SEPT/OCT 2019 emote in an exaggerated way and have a more deadpan way of speaking, and yet audiences have to understand their emo- tions, the intensity of such and the story. Thus, animators had to work hard to get those performances just right. TV host Margaux's difficulty stemmed from her huge head of big, blonde hair that was always bouncing around and in- teracting with her large, round, dangling earrings. "Her hair was really big, and if she pushed her head back or moved it forward, the hair would get in the way. Also, we would have a lot of issues with the penetration of the geometry, with her earrings or her collar," says Eskuri. Because of Margaux's excessive amount of hair and thick bangs, her face often fell into shadow, and the directors did not want to lose some of her intense acting, especially in crucial points of the film. As a result, the artists were always finding ways to come up with bounce light or extra fill on her, to be sure the audience was reading all of that acting. Meanwhile, the hairy creature Cousin Itt was covered head to toe in long strands of hair (approximately 85,000), yet animators had to make him ex- pressive without facial features, and lighters had to accentuate his shape while lighting him. Itt was not the only character that presented artists with a "hairy" situation. There is also Margaux, of course, who has 165,000 strands, and Wednesday, who has 57,000. For modeling, rigging, animation and layout, the artists used Autodesk's Maya as well as Pixologic's ZBrush at times for sculpting. For lighting, the crew used Foundry's Katana; for texturing charac- ters, props and environments, Foundry's Mari. Meanwhile, SideFX's Houdini was used for effects, while hair grooming was done with the Maya XGen plug-in. Compositing was done in Foundry's Nuke, and rendering was achieved using Pixar's RenderMan 22. "We did adapt Katana for the first time on this project, and we had used RenderMan before, although we had been using Reyes previously and on this project we used RIS," notes Brousseau. "Those were big things for us, and we spent almost half a year getting that [technol- ogy] in-house and building a pipeline for that before we really got into surfacing and lighting." However, the resulting node-based workflow provided more efficiency and eliminated many repetitive tasks, resulting in a greater creative and The Addams house is dark, with lighting coming from candles and the fireplace. Margaux's big hair challenged animators, while her technicolor environment contrasted with the Addams'. Wednesday & Morticia's deadpan expressions presented a storytelling challenge.