Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1203639
FLOWING FABRICS Given that the whole world is born of fibers, water also had to be depicted as fabric and Cronkhite Shaindlin chose the iridescent qualities of organza to represent the element. "When our characters fall into water, they don't get wet. They just get messy—they have strips of organza and glitter on their bodies," she says. Turning fabric into a flowing river, required creative solutions from the effects department too. "We did some practical shoots where we took real pieces of organza and we saw how it interacted with light... taking heavy objects and kind of pushing them along a tablecloth to see what kind of wrinkles and what kind of displacement we'd get," says Stephen Wood, Head of Effects. Cronkhite Shaindlin wanted to present multiple layers of fabric so the effects team split the river into three parts: a base, primary layer, and sheer layer. "The mid layer is the primary surfaced material with transparency and the organza texture," explains Wood. "The base layer, below the organza, is created with an iterative noise to deform it into a scrunched-up shape. It provides non-transparent reflective highlights beneath the mid layer and for parallax. The sheer layer atop the organza adds a slight hazy rainbow iridescence with a very subtle parallax." Deformation guide curves were attached to the raft for the leading edge, side ripples, and the raft's wake to make it appear as if it was floating along the river. But the team also had to keep the scale of the trolls in mind. The default would be to relate the movement to the size of a human which wouldn't work in the trolls world. "The timing of the effect had to feel like it fit within the scale of the characters," says Wood, which translated to more low frequency, low amplitude displacements. These adjustments are what Wood calls "handcrafted animation" as opposed to purely simulation based: "The computer is only going to get you so far. 26 KEYFRAME F E AT U R E A visual-development painting by Peter Zaslav of the Hard Rock stage. opposite: The final design of the Rockfish tour bus by Art Director Timothy Lamb.