Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1496872
www.postmagazine.com 21 POST MAR/APR 2023 "You can drop it in anywhere and it doesn't matter. The camera should hold up. But with a stylized look, because you're doing things like paint strokes or breaking up edges or things that aren't neces- sarily going to work in every camera angle, you have to build it in a smart way to deal with that." Edwards and his team built a new tool to accom- modate the film's stylized visuals. Known as "LAD" (level of artistic detail), this new system operated alongside the already existing "LOD" (level of detail) system. "LOD is more about: if things are further from camera, we can optimize by lowering fur density," he explains. "But LAD was more about: if we're fo- cused on the center of the frame and that's where the camera action is, what if everything around it got looser, less defined, and more interesting? So we had all these kinds of tools around that and built the infrastructure." Many of the elements prototyped in the early "look of picture" test were later expanded and built into fully-functional tools for the artists to utilize. A stamp-map tool allowed artists to generate a point cloud around an asset and project an image or set of images from those points onto the surface. "You can layer a bunch of paint strokes, plug it into the normal map or the reflections, and get these really interesting designs," he adds. "All of that is on top of your base surfacing. So it gave us another level of artistic control." Another integral tool derived from the testing phase was the aptly named "CEO." "Our effects developers, they come up with interesting names and acronyms," Edwards reveals. "We've had a tool for a long time called 'CIA,' and that stands for 'crap in the air' — all the floating particles you have. So, of course, 'CEO' stands for 'crap encapsulating objects.'" This tool allowed the artists to paint points around objects, control their scale and orientation, and even float them off the surface. "They would pick up the material and shading components closest to the surface, so they're really like an extension of your shading, and they would light properly," he continues. "They added this extra element on top of our assets." Artists were able to visualize and adjust the pro- cedural elements in Houdini's 3D viewport, using sliders to structure the points. "The underlying CG is pretty smooth and flat, but once you throw the CEO on top of it, you break up the edges — it gets a little more stylized," Edwards adds. "That was one of the key features we used everywhere." Amping up the action The team enhanced the film's action sequences by embracing anime-style movement techniques, including the selective implementation of stepped animation. This technique freezes frames of a character's movement into stylized poses or beats, highlighting key moments in the action. Based on a similar technique developed for The Bad Guys, the 2D compositing team added textural, brushstroke-like action lines to emphasize motion. In other pivotal moments, entire characters or their individual limbs would be multiplied within a single frame to stylistically highlight movement and push the animation. "We were lucky because the Boss Baby teams had pushed all that into the pipeline, so the anima- tors had a really cool single-click system to drop that in wherever they needed," Edwards recalls. Edwards also worked closely with production designer Nate Wragg to add dramatic light- ing and surreal color filters to heighten pivotal action frames. "We leaned into this really graphic aspect in just a few key moments. So it's not used widely across the film, but they're very important scenes and we bookend them," he explains. "Again, we always think about the storytelling aspect." The team further accentuated the action by cre- ating a tool for specialized rim lighting. If controlled correctly, rims produce a stylized graphic outline. "They made the rig, basically by default, for our characters to include these white material lighting, graphic rims," he adds. "So we had one from cam- era left, one from camera right. Those could just be dialed in wherever we needed, so we could always get a nice graphic character." Finishing touches One of the defining visual elements of the film is its purposeful camera and lens perspective. "We knew we were shooting through a cam- era. That was one of the things we established," Edwards recalls. "So the camera language and those kinds of optical effects were possible." This brought lens flares, depth of field, and bokeh to the film's visual style, which were all en- hanced with graphic shapes and textural detail to match the style of the world. The team also developed a unique visual toolkit for water, bubbles, fire, rain and magic effects. "Effects is not just the look, but it's the timing and the motion," he explains. "We thought about all of those elements in terms of impacts that are really quick and then settle, more like anime timing. We wanted the textural detail in the look." The final tool that brought the entire film together was MoonRay, DreamWorks Animation's in-house production renderer. Designed with a focus on efficiency and scalability, the high-perfor- mance Monte Carlo ray tracer includes an exten- sive library of production-tested, physically-based materials. Kept in a continuous state of active development, MoonRay is now open source and available for general access. Anime-style movement techniques were embraced. Successful effects are the result of timing, motion and look.