Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1234746
20 cgw e d i t i o n i , 2 0 2 0 dog, a parrot, a duck, a giraffe, an orangutan, whales, wolves, an elephant, capuchin mon- keys, all manner of small insects all the way up leaches. We have no snakes… I think." To create this virtual Noah's Ark collection, the MPC artists spent time in Oxford, UK, with a company called Amazing Animals, where they scanned and photographed every animal presented in the movie that they could get their hands on. They also intensely researched animal behavior and morphology, as well as spent time looking for the kinds of movement and expressions that the animals are capable of, which to the audience, look like human expression. Nevertheless, the ac- tions that were performed by the CG animals were in keeping with the physical realities of the real-life versions. For instance, 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 natural way possible, while keeping them entertaining," says Aithadi. The group started this kind of work with a quasi-re- ligious focus on realism, he explains, and tried to create characters that would look as real as possible. But they also le the door open to artistic direction and allowed those characters to fit into the story. The artists at MPC modeled and animat- ed the characters using Autodesk's Maya and Pixologic's ZBrush. They used Found- ry's Katana for lighting, and shaders, and Mari for texturing, lighting, and rendering, along with Pixar's RenderMan. Compos- iting was done in Foundry's Nuke, and for effects, SideFX's Houdini. While not every character was furred, the majority 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 in- stance, 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 pow- erful tool, used to create everything from hair, to leather, to grass… and everything in between," Aithadi points out. Of all the animals in the movie, the most challenging, in Aithadi's opinion, were the birds, especially Poly the parrot and Dab-Dab the duck. That's because parrot and duck feathers are very specific and fit together so well that it becomes difficult to determine where one feather ends and another begins. "This became the sin- gle-hardest problem we had to solve. Most of the time their bodies are covered with a mix of modeled feathers and Furtility feath- ers, and blended together with patches of straight-up hair," he explains. "Birds with patterns were also problematic. As the color is applied on each hair from the base to the tip, and [considering the] multitude of hair that makes up a feather, predicting exactly where some color would end up was sometimes frustrating." As for a favorite character, it was Jib the dog (voiced by Tom Holland) for Visual Effects Supervisor Dykstra. "Dogs are tough to do well as virtual characters because people are so familiar with these animals," he explains. "We know how they move and what their expressions mean, so you really have to do a detailed and accurate version of the character and their animation to fool the audience into believing a dog can talk like Tom Holland." Of course, the animals had to talk. "Mak- ing them talk was not the challenge; the challenge was conveying how they felt when they talked," says Aithadi. "The filmmakers were very concerned that the audience re- late to the animals – laugh with them or be sad with them. A major part of our research went into solving that problem without falling too far into the cartoon realm." Blending the Real and the Virtual Whether Dolittle was dunking his head into octopus Leona's aquarium in the queen's palace or performing surgery on Kevin the squirrel, there is rarely a scene in which CG animals are not interacting with live actors or physical sets. In scenes with Poly the parrot and some of the smaller animals, stuffies on sticks were used to assist the actors with their eyelines, such as when Harry Collett moved around the bedroom set of his char- acter, Dolittle's assistant Tommy Stubbins, while interacting with Poly. "The stuffy was staged and choreographed by the director and a puppeteer to move and be in the proper positions for the dialog interactions between the characters," Dykstra says. When Dragon Duology On his adventure, Dolittle also encoun- ters 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, however, was within the design stage. "We want- ed 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 pattern 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 emo- tional level. They both feel in the same way and react in 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 organisms 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 intri- cate texture work. The team additionally had to develop an interesting way for Ginko to spit fire. "We went with the idea that she would always have a 'pilot light' inside her mouth. When she would spit fire, she would inhale the flame inside her throat and it would ignite the combustible."