Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1334563
j a n • f e b • m a r c h 2 0 2 1 c g w 2 1 My-Makers for Lunaria; he told me to reference the cov- er of 'Dark Side of the Moon' by Pink Floyd – a simple prism of white light and refracted colors. He said he had no idea what Lunaria looks like, but it needs to be as strong as that cover," Desrumaux recalls. On Lunaria, the moon goddess is the city's primary light source, and everything is illuminated from within – as opposed to Earth, where the light is reflected. "There were a couple of things that I knew right away. I knew that I wanted a black sky in the space, and that I wanted colors," she says. Another goal was to avoid creating anything that looked like it could've been constructed by humans. Further inspiration for Lunaria and its resident Lunarians came from Catalan artist Joan Miro, whose work is oen described as abstract combined with Sur - realist fantasy. "He had a way of designing objects that looked like they were floating geometric shapes," says Keane. So, little by little, the filmmakers came up with the idea of a floating city com - prising shapes and colors. But, there were inherent issues when it came to animating and lighting these 3D Lunarians. "How do you animate characters with [practically] no bones? How do you light a shot when they are standing on a building that has a light source that's shaped like a balloon and is always floating, and they them - selves have light sources that are coming from inside? How do you see their eyes? Where do you put them?" Keane says of the questions that had to be considered. The Lunarians are floating, amorphous- shaped, brightly-colored gummy bear-like ancient characters formed many years ago from tears that are continually shed by Chang'e – the most recent ones being the least evolved in terms of structure. There is no comparable real-world mate - rial for the translucent, watery-gaseous Lunarians, so it was up to the VFX team to devise a digital material befitting that description. "Lunaria is this crazy land with lots of colors and these characters that are sort of mid-form – so and blobby – and that carried out to the buildings as well and is persistent throughout Lunaria," says Smith. As Kapijimpanga points out, these characters shared a common rig that was really flexible, "because we weren't exactly sure what the design would evolve into." As a complication, little pieces of material would oen break off as the Lunarians moved. So, to enable animation to more easily handle these gelatinous-like creatures, a rig was developed that integrat- ed Houdini's engine into Maya and used Houdini's powerful particle system to create a unified mesh that gave animators unprec- edented freedom to create unique shapes and performances. As Ian Farnsworth, VFX supervisor, ex- plains, setting up a rig to handle the liquidy, blobby creatures in Maya would have been a big undertaking, so instead the group looked to Houdini and Houdini Engine for its Open- Lunaria is filled with colorful, geometric shapes. Everything on Lunaria was formed from tears shed by Chang'e. Fei Fei meets Gobi aer landing on the dark side of the moon.