Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1512296
26 KEYFRAME GOING THE DISTANCE Animating rich watercolor illustrations to create a living storybook became the driving aesthetic vision for Wish. But they couldn't just layer a textured watercolor pattern over the top of the scenes. This would cause what is known as the shower door effect. "What we had to do was come up with a technique that had never been done before," says Kyle Odermatt, Visual Effects Supervisor. A significant component of the look of a watercolor painting is the textural quality provided by the tooth of the paper. "If you're painting an object in the distance on watercolor paper, that texture created by the tooth of the paper will appear very large relative to the object," Odermatt says. "For example, a house in the distance is drawn much smaller than a similar-sized house up close to maintain perspective. If you were to bake the paper texture into the closer, larger house and shrink it to represent a more distant house, the texture would feel too small and make them not seem like part of the same watercolor painting." To recreate this effect, Odermatt says, "You adjust this textural pattern across everything in the scene on any given frame" so that it appears that the watercolor paper texture is always the same size irrespective of distance, maintaining the illusion that the artwork is all of one piece. With the technology that was created to address this issue, "as something moves away, the texture actually gets larger on it, and if something gets closer, the texture gets smaller, so that everything on the screen has a consistent textured size overlay to it. That's the dynamic component of the system. It has to change over time if the camera moves or if an object or character moves onscreen." An added challenge is that storybook illustrations of yore used more than just watercolor paint. "These are not pure watercolors but watercolor illustrations that have an ink line component over the top," says Odermatt. The classic illustrators would do a sketch, then paint with watercolor before going back with dark (usually black) ink and drawing in lines to help define the illustration. "We're doing the same thing," Odermatt says. "We're computing lines that could go everywhere if you saw the line render pass. But then we modulate that very carefully based on what we want you to look at and where we want you to look in a given frame." The storybook look was also achieved by not using any optical depth of field. Odermatt says this was a big challenge for the filmmakers because "we're used to blurring things in the background or blurring things in the foreground that gives us a certain control over what the viewer looks at. In illustration that isn't the case. They don't tend to paint things blurry. They tend to paint things with less detail they don't want you to focus on and add detail where they do. Irrespective of distance from the viewer." This technique was applied not only to objects and buildings in the background, but also to characters. "Based on visual development's beautiful designs, our talented modeling team crafted 27 unique faces and many body types to represent the various age groups of the people of Rosas," says Kaur. "Our cloth simulation team created many modular garments that could be mixed and matched to create outfit variations. On top of outfit and hairstyle variation, Character Look Development's primvars (primitive variables) toolset workflow allowed for the potential of hundreds of thousands of different combinations of colors, patterns, and textures." In the foreground all of this detail enables visibly distinctive variety, but as characters recede into the distance, "detail is reduced, lines are offset from bodies, and groups are clumped into sections of color so that they almost become a part of the architecture," says Kaur. this page: Concept art for Rosas displays the Mediterranean colors that influenced the feel of the film. following page from top: Framing was an important part of setting a scene's mood; Translucent spheres represent the wishes of the citizens of Rosas; The heart shape of the mask on Star's face is a reference to Mickey Mouse. 30 KEYFRAME F E AT U R E