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mouth expressions used throughout the film. "Most of our characters in an average Pixar film have a narrower range of movement, so the rigging doesn't have to be as robust or versatile. Immediately when we started to do some of our early animation tests, we were just breaking the technology that we had out of the gate. Then we started building the new pieces that we would need in keeping with the design language." Typically, the animators avoid having characters move into profile, but on Luca they embraced it, focusing a lot on the silhouette and design of the poses. Here, the silhouette is clean and round. There is not a lot of anatomy; the designs are simple, bold and graphic. So they would not break the silhouette when the character is in profile, the artists would turn the head while keeping the mouth inside the silhouette and then popping it into the profile. Custom controls and sculpting let the artists adjust the silhouettes, profiles and the shape of the mouth and the eyes to allow for the desired versatility. "It was more like a hand-drawn quality in 3D be- cause we were literally sculpting in space with the camera," adds Skaria. With the squash-and-stretch style came some fun design departures, including some multi-limb animation, popular in the 2D world, to illustrate fast action, "part of the playful, goofy style," says Venturini. This was done using a variation of the transformation rig, only in these instances it used two human rigs, for example, as opposed to a human and sea monster rig. WATER CRAFT With a film set in a seaside town and a cast that includes sea creatures, you know there is CG water, and lots of it. Jon Reisch, effects supervisor, recalls looking at the storyboards two years ago and see- ing "hundreds and hundreds of shots in Luca that involved water" — the sea in the background, the Portorosso harbor, the boys splashing in and out of the water, and more. While Pixar's tool set has become better and better at capturing realism when it comes to water, for this film, the focus was on stylization and play- fulness, thus requiring the team to push their tools in a totally different direction in order to achieve a more controllable and designable water. First, they focused on the color of the water, with all the beautiful blues and greens, driven through volumetrics underneath the surface. The goal was to make the water feel like it is from the Mediterranean as opposed to some tropical setting. "Volumetrics is one of the cornerstone building blocks we use in the effects department, typically for clouds, smoke or explosions," explains Reisch. "But it turns out that the way light interacts with the water when it passes through the volume of the water in the Mediterranean Sea and in the ocean, it scatters and has similar properties to the way the light scatters around in a cloud. So, we took the chance of using volumes to drive the way the light scatters and falls off, to get those really rich blues and greens, and drive the color that Enrico wanted, which is authentic to the area." Second, the effects department pushed the styl- ization of the ocean surface and that of the splashes — and married those two worlds together. While Pixar has tackled water before, for this film the art- ists used a different system than they did on Finding Dory, requiring a good deal of back-and-forth work with the RenderMan team to figure out a way to seamlessly blend at render time the procedural styl- ized ocean that is mostly seen on-screen with the simulated areas of splashes by the characters. Artists needed control over the sculptural shapes that would be injected into their splash simulations. To this end, Pixar reworked some of its tools, giving individual artist control over certain bands of fre- quency in the water simulations by allowing them to dial the high-frequency detail up or down. "It was about challenging what our own pre- conceptions were about how we would approach that work and using the tools we had in a slightly new way to push into that more simplified, stylized, almost storybook look," says Reisch. Most of the effects work, including the cartoon water splashes, was done using SideFX's Houdini, with the Houdini FLIP simulator at the core. The ocean, meanwhile, was shaded with RenderMan and OSL, then rendered in Foundry's Katana. Custom nodes were used to generate the initial spectrum of ocean waves. OVER THE LAND & UNDER THE SEA It's clear that Luca, with its unique style, is some- what atypical for Pixar. Then again, what really is "typical" for a studio that is constantly pushing new boundaries? A phrase we often hear in the film is "Silencio, Bruno", a phrase turned by Alberto (and then by Luca) as a way of ignoring that little voice that tells you, "No, you can't" and holds you back. Thank goodness Casarosa and the Pixar team hushed that little voice when creating this film. Grazie. Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor of Post's sister publication, CGW. www.postmagazine.com 33 POST JULY/AUG 2021 Water was designed to look like that of the Mediterranean. The film employs a 2D, watercolor aesthetic.