Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1334563
22 cgw j a n • f e b • m a r c h 2 0 2 1 My-Makers VDB toolset and procedural workflows. As a result, the Lunarians were able to have their body parts separate, blend back together, and have an arbitrary number of control points added to the rig. "In addition to giving animators a lot more freedom, running it through Houdini gave us a lot more control over the final look. We were able to up-res and smooth the char- acters to a higher degree for rendering, add custom attributes for shading, and calculate accurate motion vectors," Farnsworth says. The oldest character residing on Lunaria is Gobi, who is more developed, as are the trio of so-called biker chicks on motorcycles and a pair of playful lions that help guide Fei Fei's rocket. They all have a more defined form and, thus, a more traditional rig. One of the bigger challenges for the artists was that each Lunarian emitted its own light source. "These characters were sort of like a drop of water, which is a liquid, but it's a solid volume of liquid, and within that there is a gas that provides a glow and color," explains Smith. "For us to have a volume of water undisturbed by the gas inside, we basically had to cheat and tell the renderer that this was two materials that were capable of something that's physically impossible to have. You can have gas inside water, but it would just be a bubble. In this case, the gas lived in the same volume as the water." Moreover, these self-illuminating crea- tures existed within a self-illuminating city. "It was definitely something we hadn't done before. The most important thing to the filmmakers was that there would be an explosion of color on Lunaria, that there would be an energy to it. The design has an elegance and simplicity to it, so we needed to bend the rules of lighting to achieve that. Even though everything was created in 3D, we wanted to blend in some of the 2D aes- thetics," says Chan. And on Lunaria, the native characters and buildings not only give off light, but they also absorb light. "And in ray tracing, that is pretty complex," says Smith. The lighting situation became even more complicated in scenes where Lunarians and earthlings shared the same shot. "Both the illuminated characters and earthlings need- ed to react to light when they were standing next to one another or going through the city," explains Smith, whose team recon- figured its mesh light soware based on technology initially created for Electro in The Amazing Spider-Man films whereby any geometry could be turned into a light. "We wanted the characters to be able to react to light. So our shading team had to rewrite that soware so it could both respond to light and give off light beautifully and realisti- cally without a lot of ray traced noise." In one scene shortly aer Fei Fei finds herself on Lunaria, she enters a gigantic con- cert hall where at least 250,000 Lunarians are gathered to watch the moon goddess sing. "With all the gases inside each Lunari- an and the effects, it was very complicated and required a lot of optimization to render," notes Chan. For huge crowd scenes like that, the dev team also tweaked its in-house tool called Sprout, which had been used to paint trees across an environment, only in this case, their brushstrokes produced Lunarians. Tens of thousands of them in some cases. "The film had some of the biggest crowds I've ever dealt with," says Kapijimpanga. Creang a Godde Typically, Chang'e is depicted as beauti- ful, peaceful, genteel, and soly feminine, though in Over the Moon, the filmmak- ers turned that on its head, making the goddess more diva-like as she basks in the adoration of the Lunarians. (At least this is the case when Fei Fei first meets her, but she eventually draws out the gentle, empathetic person the goddess is known to be.) She has extremely long, flowing hair, but sports some amazing traditional hairdos for which a simulation artist at Sony Imageworks wrote a tool within Maya that enabled him to complete the style quickly by building a model and then filling its volume with hair. Indeed, Chang'e is a goddess who is larger than life, literally, standing 9 feet tall. To make her stand out even more, this glamazon is outfitted in elaborate couture, designed by renowned fashion designer Guo Pei, who created Rihanna's yellow dress for the 2015 Met Gala. "When talking about Chang'e's costume design, we knew we needed someone who was going to honor her authenticity, but we also wanted someone who could give her a fresh and modern take," says Chou. The gowns Pei sketched were intricate and elaborate; to manu - facture them in real life would have taken thousands of hours. Even in CGI, this was no easy task. "For Chang'e's dress in the Chamber of Exquisite Sadness, [Pei] designed 'super silk' that floated ethereally around her with every movement. She provided the patterns, fabric samples, and embroidery designs for each costume (accurate enough to be sewn together and even worn on a live model)," says Keane. "Chang'e's royal robe tells the story of her love for Houyi as two intertwin- ing exotic birds." Then, the cloth team at Sony Imageworks used 3D soware from Marvelous Designer to build the CG clothes and fit them to the character's body. Like most couture, once the dress was on the body, adjustments had to be made, and in this case, simulation tests run. "It was complex and time-con- Fei Fei, like the artists, learned some valuable lessons on this journey.