Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/14320
Animation n n n n Te catalyst for the conflict is Lotso, the plush teddy bear who runs the day-care center like a prison guard. “It was really important to make him believable,” Quaroni says. “So we did a lot of work on the controls that drive the hair parameters to achieve the quality we wanted for him and also for the humans.” Bonnie has curly hair, and Barbie has long, straighter hair. “Mattel doesn’t do the hairdo we use any more, but we got them to make one for us,” Bakshi says. “We wanted to know what it looks like; how much it bends.” Pixar grooms the hair in Maya with NURBS curves, using parameters, paint tools, and pro- cedural patterns to give it particular character- istics—length, bounciness, curl, color, and so forth. “Every movie for us now is about little steps,” Quaroni says, “incremental, evolution- ary steps.” Dirty Dozens Te little steps made it possible to simulate hair and fur for the 24 background kids as well as for the main characters. “We had a team with one simulation person, one shader person, one modeler, and one articulation person [rigger] tasked with getting the background kids as good as possible in a limited amount of time,” Bakshi says. “Te goal was to have them all look good and not like each other.” Te team would show the supervisors all the kids in a group and then work on only the ones that stood out. “One shirt might look too much like another, or the hair on one kid wouldn’t look right,” Bakshi says. “It took them two months to do the 24 kids.” When Andy’s toys arrive at the day-care center, the kids, the toys in the day-care center, and the toys in Lotso’s gang all appear together with Andy’s toys in one shot that included most of the 300 animated characters in the film. It was one of the most challenging se- quences for the animation team. “It was like an impending storm,” says Po- desta. “We had everyone put everything else down and said, ‘We’ll do this in one giant, two-week party.’ ” Pixar created a festive at- mosphere and even brought in an ice-cream truck. It worked. Two weeks later, they showed the shot to an amazed Unkrich. Soft Body, Hard Body Te challenge for the effects team centered, as is often the case, on a series of events near the end of the film. Te toys find themselves inside a garbage bag, which is inside a garbage truck. Te truck dumps the bag onto a conveyer belt that pulls trash, and Andy’s toys—Woody, Buzz, Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, Slinky, Rex, Hamm, At top, Lotso, a new character and one of 300 animated characters in Toy Story 3, leads Woody, Buzz, and Andy’s other toys into danger. At bottom, in addition to the 24 background kids and the toys the animators turned into characters, modelers created 2500 unique objects for the day-care center. Jessie, Bullseye her horse, and Barbie, (with newcomer Ken)—toward a huge grinder and an incinerator. And this sequence isn’t the only scary moment. Te Jolly Chimp is as bad as Sid, the human kid who made mutant toys, in the first film. And, Big Baby is no baby doll, either. “Baby doesn’t do anything bad, but we filmed the doll in a creepy way,” Unkrich says. “Every- one likes being scared in a safe environment.” And Jason Katz, head of story, adds, “We wanted to take the toys to the endgame. It’s intense; it will be a challenging film for a three year old. Tis family faces a real dilemma. But, when we tried to remove the scene, the film didn’t work.” For the effects team, the dilemma with the endgame was in simulating a massive amount of soft and rigid bodies. “Te trash has every- thing from plastic bags to pieces of wood,” Quaroni says. “We couldn’t know which pieces of trash would go in the garbage truck or wherever, so we needed to make it easy to add parts to the simulation.” Before this film, modelers singled out ob- jects selected for simulation and built them based on the type of destruction that would occur later. But the climatic sequence had 200 shots of continuous effects. “We said, ‘Guys, we need a more flexible system,’” Quaroni says. “Rather than remembering what needed to be set up and building models for a par- ticular moment when they’d be melted or smashed, we assumed all of them would be. Tat was our mind-set.” It took a year to set up the infrastruc- ture they needed, but at the end, they could crunch, smash, trash, or melt anything they wanted. Glass, cars, computers … it didn’t matter. “We built 3000 models that we didn’t have to worry about,” Quaroni says. Tat is, the modelers constructed every object to be ready for simulation. “We made sure every object in the pipeline could be fully simulated as a rigid or soft body,” Quaroni says. “You can take a building and make it Jell-O. Or make Jell-O into a piece of steel. Te shading system knows not to swim the textures. And, before, when you wanted a special object like that to interact with a model, we needed to make a special model, a July 2010 17