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www.postmagazine.com 20 POST MAR/APR 2023 Next, it was time to see how the new Puss de- sign 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 experi- ment with the animation style, use this new adjust- ed 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 extensive testing to explore the limits of the new graphic elements and gain a better under- standing of the visual dynamics. "I think it's important to push beyond where you're comfortable and find where things break, because then you know where the line is," Edwards explains. As head of look Baptiste Van Opstal reviewed the background designs, it became evident that the environment designs were overshadowing 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 soften 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 between the hairs, soften 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 handcrafted 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 department 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 want- ed to lean into — that the audience can fill in the gaps and you don't actually need to have proper geometry, even. You can have floating pieces and things that don't connect, and that's okay." The project utilized hair pipeline tools devel- oped for other recent DreamWorks features, which proved to be very useful. "We were fortunate to be working right behind The Bad Guys, and they were prototyping a lot of really awesome, interesting things, including a painterly filter that would basically help give more of a stroke-like appearance," Edwards recalls. "It just softens the fur and gets rid of some of the hair-to-hair detail. It was just enough to push it a little more painterly." A hair color tool developed for Trolls also added artistic nuance to the design. "Instead of the typical route of having a hair color come from the root that's grown from the surface, we could project that on top of the hair so we could do strokes and things sort of outside the traditional hair pipeline," he continues. The team added new controls to the system that would allow for different hue variations and shading across hair clumps to enhance the graph- ic appearance. Establishing environments Visual development artist Zac Retz painted a doc- tor's office scene that allowed the team to estab- lish a benchmark for environmental detail. "It represented a lot of the things that we were going after," Edwards explains. Blending realistic 3D materials with free-floating foliage details, the painting evoked an abstract, stylized feel. The painting also set the tone for the film's layered approach to color. "Zac really influenced the color aspects of our surfacing textures. Nothing is just a color," he recalls. "It's always a bunch of colors creating that hue from a distance. We always said, 'Make sure you're not just painting red; it's red and orange and yellow with a little green.'" The test sequence that followed marked the first time the team felt the world was truly com- ing together, with Puss fitting seamlessly into his surroundings. "The props around him were tangible enough that he could pick them up and interact with them, but you can see there's still a lot of painterly brush- stroke feelings," he adds. "There's abstraction, there are painted reflections that are really stylized — all of those details." Engineering a new workflow Adding new levels of detail to the characters and environments required the team to redesign their entire animation workflow. "I think one of the biggest challenges with more stylization is, in a physically-based setup, you can build an asset in super-high detail," Edwards states. Hair was softened and made to look more artistic. A hair-color tool developed for Trolls was used to add nuance.