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6 cgw e d i t i o n i , 2 0 2 0 Emron Grover, dad and his upper half was the most technically complex costume ever done at Pixar. "We had a number of require- ments to hit when creating Dad's upper half: It had to be funny, appealing, physically plausible, look like a person at first glance, act like a person at times, but also act like a lump of cloth," he says. Pulling off the look, however, called for a coordinated effort among several de- partments, in particular, a delicate dance between the animation and simulation departments because the hoodie had to be simulated, but animation would control the movement for the acting, "and it turns out that was really hard to do," Stocker adds. According to Jacob Brooks, simulation supervisor, dad was his team's biggest undertaking. "He has a stuffed, fluffy pillow top," Brooks says of the character. "So layers are always hard in simulation. In order to get dad to overlap properly and move like a ragdoll would, we spent a lot of our time dialing in physical properties to make him feel heavy and floppy. We worked with animation to make sure his funny moments were believable and physical." Technicians built a system that allowed animation to hit key poses for the character while still achieving the ragdoll physics. The goal, says Brooks, was to "get him to perform in a physical way that was art directed." The upper and lower portions of dad's body contained two different rigs. In fact, there were two different versions of dad that the animators worked with – the half-guy version that comprised just the lower body, and the full version that had additional controls for the upper body. Depending on the shot, the animators would use one or the other, or even both versions, according to Sudeep Rangaswamy, technology and pipeline supervisor. Special tools enabled the animators to run simulations at their desks so they could see what the acting would look like. The animators could dial in how much sim and how much animation they wanted. "We could animate the rig fully, and we could dial in between the two, or in pieces or parts, but it didn't have quite the same physics [as a full simulation]," Stocker explains. Ultimately, the final simula- tions were done by the sim department. So, for instance, if the animators wanted dad to shake someone's hand, then ani- mation had to drive that action, with a little simulation on top of it. A simulation alone wouldn't achieve that. However, for the lower part of dad's body, the animators keyframed it within Presto, the studio's in-house animation soware. The lower body then drove the upper por- tion. "So if dad was just walking, we could hit a button for the upper body, and for the most part, the arms would move, the head would bounce, and the torso felt like a stuffed hoodie. But then that hoodie also came with animation controls. So if we then wanted dad to turn his head at a certain point, we could drive that exactly how we wanted to. We could get close, and then sim would take over and honor that." The legs were animated just like any character, and then the simulation depart- ment would run a typical sim to provide movement on the pants. However, the boys kept dad on a tight leash, so to speak, using a retractable dog leash to move and control him so he would not wander off. The leash was tethered to dad's belt; controls helped slide the attachment around the belt for continuity through the sequence. The group also built controls that could pull the pants so when a character tugged on the leash, that area would pull and "really sell the physicality of that action," says Stocker. While this would move the belt-line and the belt, it would not move the upper body in that particular shot. "So in a case like that, the sim department would have to do some custom work to make the upper body react to the belt-line being moved. Where the hoodie overlapped the belt-line was a tricky area, and for the most part, the hoodie was situated over the top and purposely hid any leash interaction," he adds. "But, there were always times when we had to work to make that connection look natural." The Dragon A "larger" animation challenge was the drag- on monster, particularly due to its size and complexity. The dragon has a unique design. Its face is flat and resembles the mascot of the school, while its body was formed from the bits and parts of the debris as it wrecked the high school – cement chunks, pieces of metal and rebar, even nearby cars, and so The film mixes fantasy (30 percent) with the familiar (70 percent).