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January/February 2020

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DOOLITTLE www.postmagazine.com 28 POST JAN/FEB 2020 stance, Yoshi the polar bear couldn't use a hammer because he does not have opposable thumbs. "We were really focused on trying to give these characters a way to show emotion in the most nat- ural way possible, while keeping them entertaining," says Aithadi. The group started this kind of work with a quasi-religious focus on realism, he explains, and tried to create characters that would look as real as possible. But they also left the door open to artistic direction and allowed those characters to fit into the story. The artists at MPC modeled and animated the characters using Autodesk's Maya and Pixologic's ZBrush. They used Foundry's Katana for light- ing and shaders, and Mari for texturing, lighting and rendering, along with Pixar's RenderMan. Compositing was done in Foundry's Nuke, and for effects, SideFX's Houdini. While not every character was furred, the ma- jority of them were, aside from the odd insect here and there and, of course, the dragon. The fur added another layer of complexity to the creation process. For instance, Yoshi the polar bear has the greatest number of hairs: 9,365,414! "Even the birds' feathers were made of fur," Aithadi notes. The fur on MPC's animals was generated using the studio's proprietary Furtility tool, first written in 2005 for the film 10,000 BC to create mammoth hair. "Since then, it has evolved to become a very powerful tool, used to create every- thing from hair, to leather, to grass…and everything in between," Aithadi points out. Of all the animals in the movie, the most challeng- ing, in Aithadi's opinion, were the birds, especially Poly the parrot and Dab-Dab the duck. That's be- cause parrot and duck feathers are very specific and fit together so well that it becomes difficult to de- termine where one feather ends and another begins. "This became the single-hardest problem we had to DRAGON DUOLOGY On his adventure, Dolittle also encounters an angry, fire-breathing dragon, Ginko-Who- Soars, guardian of the Eden tree. Creating the character was fairly straightforward, says VFX supervisor Nicolas Aithadi. The challenge, how- ever, was within the design stage. "We wanted to create a cool-looking dragon. We didn't want to go the usual route and use lizard skin as a reference, so instead we chose to go with turtle skin. That's because turtles look way older, and Ginko is a very old lady. But also, their skin pat- tern is very interesting-looking." There were several things to think about when it came to the dragon. Ginko and the cave where she resides were connected on a visual and emotional level. They both feel the same way and react the same way; there's a symbiotic relationship between the two. "These bioluminescent effects had multiple purposes," says Aithadi. "They would echo Ginko's anger, but also her pain, and eventually, show us her true color." The cave emotes throughout the sequence, and those emotions are illustrated through the appearance and disappearance of green and red fungus across the surface of the cave. As Aithadi explains, these bioluminescent organ- isms trace a path to the dragon and wake her up. "We had to find a way to give the same look that we saw on the cave, on the surface of the dragon's skin," he says. However, the artists had to make sure it wouldn't compete too much with the very detailed and intricate texture work. The team additionally had to develop an interesting way for Ginkgo to spit fire. "We went with the idea that she would always have a 'pi- lot light' inside her mouth. When she would spit fire, she would inhale the flame inside her throat and it would ignite the combustible." Inside the cave of Ginko the dragon. MPC used Autodesk Maya and Pixologic's ZBrush for modeling and animation.

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