Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1203639
A QUILTED LANDSCAPE "When I'm flying, I look down at farmland and it feels like a quilt to me," says Cronkhite Shaindlin. This quilted landscape served as the initial inspiration for Lonesome Flats, the country-western world, and the rich history of quilt-making aligned with the story. But balancing a myriad of patterns and textures can be overwhelming even in a mythical troll world, so the team stuck to a monochromatic palette of ochers, siennas, umbers, oranges and golds. Again, the fibers, from twine to burlap, dictated the design and execution of the world. But it was also important to understand the scale of the materials and how they might appear to a 3-inch character with 3 inches of hair. "Since we're doing a movie about these tiny characters, twine is actually a big, solid rope for them," says Lamb. "We started lining buildings, giving some detail with twine and string." It was imperative to get more than a 2D perspective of the surfaces, so Harbeck and Surfacing Artist Christopher N. Harvey MacGyvered a F E AT U R E 3D scanner that Cronkhite Shaindlin says looked like a salad spinner. "Chris came up with an initial prototype using a $3 colander from Walmart," says Harbeck. They soon graduated to a fancier version incorporating 50 LED lights and better cameras to be able to collect more data, such as height information, in order to sell the scale and the look of the surfaces. "The lights would go around like a clock, divided into eight sections, and we would take eight images at different angles," says Harbeck. The surfacing team would then feed the data into a third-party program that would build a texture set with different mapping properties. It served as a great starting point but the artists still had other challenges to navigate such as creating more depth and geometry in the materials. "We're so close to all of these fibers, it just wasn't adequate to represent the textures," explains Harvey. "Each yarn, each thread, all the twine in the burlap [were generated] with actual curves and rendered so that we could have a more fully geometric and dimensional effect to all the fibers—how much twist, how much fray at the end, how many loops and knots—rather than just relying on textures and traditional modeling approaches." We generated billions of curves to represent a lot of this geometry," adds Harbeck. "We needed to consider there might be 10 characters in the shot, and the characters themselves all have fuzz on their skin, their hair, their clothes. When we put it all together, there is a lot going into each frame so we had to try to be as efficient as we could with all the different assets, but we also were pushing that boundary as far as we could, and lighting did an awesome job to render and optimize it." this page: Cronkhite Shaindlin crafted patchwork cacti models. opposite, from top: Entering Lonesome Flats (CG Supervisor Sondra Verlander, Lead Lighter Lyndon Li); A bird's-eye view of the organza river (CG Supervisor Mike Hamler, Lead Lighter Iveth Bueno); and a visual blueprint of the world. 24 KEYFRAME