Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1495163
6 cgw j a n u a r y • f e b r u a r y • m a r c h 2 0 2 3 it off screen. Although the cape fits his heroic persona, there was a strategic reason behind its removal. "Capes are kind of hard. They were really tricky back then, so it was something that they didn't want to take on," he reveals. With an arsenal of new animation tools now available, the team was able to add the cape back to Puss' ensemble. The rest of the heroic cat's accessories were updated to add asymmetry and make more of a statement on screen, from the feather in his jaunty hat down to the tips of his iconic footwear. The team also redesigned core aspects of Puss' anatomy to make him more cat-like. This included smoothing out the shoulders and streamlining his silhouette, as cats do not have rounded scapula bones like humans. Character designer Shiyoon Kim created sketches and paintovers to solidify Puss' revamped appearance. "We did all of this to try and get an idea of an update where he was still recognizable, a little more streamlined, and a little more graphic in areas. That was the model we followed," Edwards states. Aer all of the updates, it was important to determine the key elements of the previous character designs that should be carried into the new version. "Everybody would come back to the cat from the first movie being so and furry, so that was something that we realized we really need to keep," he adds. "We adjusted the groom to get more in line with that first version." Pushing the Limits The next step was building a 3D art model of Puss to convey his size and scale compared to other elements of the world. "We wanted to make sure he was small because his ego is so big. It's more of a nice contrast to have this legendary character fighting a four-story-tall giant when he's cat-sized," Edwards explains. The team completed extensive iterations on the model to determine if any adjustments were needed for the groom, clothing materials, colors, or lighting set- ups. "This was a way to also just look at the character and try to find out if he would work," he adds. Next, it was time to see how the new Puss design would perform as a CG animated character in the "look of picture" development phase. "We put together an early test animation with a very small team," Edwards recalls. "Just trying to get things up and running where we can experiment with the animation style, use this new ad- justed character, make sure all of the aspects we liked about that character were coming through in the animation, and really explore the world now." It was important to put the new character design through exten- sive testing to explore the limits of the new graphic elements and gain a better understanding of the visual dynamics. "I think it's im- portant to push beyond where you're comfortable and find where things break, because then you know where the line is," Edwards ex- plains. As head of look Baptiste Van Opstal reviewed the background designs, it became evident that the environment designs were over- shadowing the characters. "We went really far with the backgrounds, and we realized our character wasn't catching up," he shares. This led to more nuanced adjustments to the character's design. "We realized our cat didn't fit in the world. We started looking at the fur itself and the groom, and seeing what we could do to get him a little more into the painterly world," he adds. Splitting Hairs The standard raw groom render from a ray tracer is highly detailed, with hair-to-hair occlusion and other precise visual elements. "We wanted to soen some of that and make it feel a little more artistic, so we started doing experiments," Edwards explains. This included adding subsurface scattering throughout the groom to blend be- tween the hairs, soen the detail, and mix the color washes. The team also added guard hairs, which are the longer, slightly thicker hairs that form the outer layer of a cat's coat. "Those were great because we could use them more as illustrative lines," he continues. "We could add those in and get some breaks in the silhouette." Small breaks in the hair lines further solidified the handcraed design aesthetic. "This is subtle, but we noticed in the art that a lot of the lines didn't necessarily connect. You sketch things and you have breaks in the lines," he explains. The team asked the R&D de- partment if it would be possible to map transparency to the hairs. It was indeed possible, and it achieved the desired result. "That was something that stylistically we wanted to lean into — that the audi- ence can fill in the gaps and you don't actually need to have proper A painterly filter was applied to soen fur detail and add a stroke-like appearance.