Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1438374
28 cgw o c t o b e r • n o v e m b e r • d e c e m b e r 2 0 2 1 animated musical were able to capture the vibrancy of Cuba and then follow Vivo and Gabi to the kitschy world of Key West. Our journey then takes us to the swamps of the Everglades, filled with fun and scary creatures, and we finally land in Miami, which is the Emerald City, teeming with energy and the great cultures of South and Central America." According to Herbst, the Everglades had the most complex environment in the film, especially given the number of vegetation pieces that had to be created and com- bined, which was accomplished using Im- ageworks' Sprout, a brush tool for stamping down vegetation for a more organic look. "The backgrounds got pretty complicated based on the number of elements. Luckily, we have a very robust instancing system, so the memory footprint to render those wasn't that bad," Herbst adds. "This is one location where if we had done it with all paintings, the area would have felt pretty flat. Instead, when each camera moves, you really feel a depth to those environments all the way back out to the horizon." One sequence takes place when Gabi, Vivo, and The Sand Dollars scout troop trio are caught in a storm while lost in the Ever- glades. To sell how violent the storm was, the effects team had to move every branch, leaf, and twig in the scene. "At one point, the stat that was given to me was we had over a trillion triangles moving on screen at once. I'm not sure how accurate that is, but every- thing was moving and had to be simulated to instill the fear of the storm and how it drives Gabi and Vivo apart," says Herbst. While the team added a painterly look onto the environments in the background, closer to the camera, the characters and objects have a more typical CG look, ani- mated in Autodesk's Maya. According to Kevin Webb, head of character animation, the character builds were fairly standard, although each required some outside-the- box thinking in order to solve some issue or another. Some examples include Gabi's overlapping layers of clothing and her giant spikey hair; the spoonbill Dancarino's feather and wing setups; and Marta's complicated necklace, which proved difficult to simulate and look believable. "Every character had something that didn't come easily," he adds. The goal for the hair and cloth on this film was not to have it move naturally, so the style was designed with Character Art Designer Joe Moshier based on how he wanted a cer- tain piece of cloth, for instance, to move. To this end, tools were built around the studio's current simulation soware, which is Maya's nCloth (and Maya's XGen for hair), so it wasn't totally physically driven. "The path we took was to use these really powerful tools and then break away from the real-world physics and build a new set of tools based on the physics of our world," explains Herbst. The group took the same approach for the water to give it a more painterly feel befitting the overall style of the film. "We referenced a lot of classic 2D animation since we weren't worrying about volume preservation. With a splash, for instance, we didn't need to show every droplet of water going into the air and coming back down," says Herbst. "Rather, it was more important to give the impression of things." Herbst found Dancarino the most chal- lenging character "because feathers are al- ways difficult, especially wings, and we were trying to get a Muppet-like feel for him and Valentina, the other spoonbill." Webb, on the other hand, points to the Everglades python Lutador as the most technically challenging. "Snakes are quite hard to do in CG anima- tion, but Lutador was far from typical. The early concept drawings had him in these very hard geometric angles, which looked very cool but is the antithesis of how a snake works," he explains. "He was also covered in these thick scales and large, fractal crystals." Yet, Lutador had to move like a traditional snake with elegant curves and sweeping arcs, but then slide in and out of these strik- ing crisp angles while maintaining the rigidity of those crystals and scales. Solving those challenges required a joint solution between rigging, animation, and FX. It started with some clever rigging to allow the animators to dial in how much angularity any given part of the snake would have. Then FX would run a simulation over top to main- tain the rigidity of the crystals and scales. HITTING ALL THE NOTES Indeed, music is the backbone of this film — throughout the story line as well as the char- acters and cast — and features original songs by Miranda. In fact, Vivo had been a passion project of his since he wrote In the Heights, and began writing the songs for the film in 2009. Miranda wrote eight original songs and a finale, described as "a heartfelt love letter to Cuban music, with a dash of Caribbean and hip-hop influences added to the mix." It was then up to Zaragoza to bring Miranda's music to animated life. For this, he revisited such classics as Fantasia as well as works by Expressionists. "We went beyond all the conventions and realism, and experimented with shapes and music," he explains. "We are creating this world in our movie that is believable for our characters, but we're not aiming for realism." As they did for the real-world visuals in the movie, the filmmakers leaned into an artistic style for the musical sequences, only turning up the volume significantly. The worlds in the musical numbers change dramatically compared to the rest of the movie, transitioning from a 3D look to one that looks more 2D. These fantasy-styled sequences were built and animated in 3D but given a shading texture pass that made them feel more like a traditional 2D cel-ani- mated sequence. Insofar as the musical numbers are concerned, the filmmakers used two dif- ferent approaches, with the goal of giving The Everglades contains lots of vegetation, craed with Imageworks' Sprout.