Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1530710
Production Designer Raymond Zibach (RZ): For me, it was the potential to head off issues, because we always had issues when we would go to HDR grade. We're working in sRGB and you're opening it up to get these brighter highlight areas. The benefit's going to be holding on to more color as we get into that highlight range. I have actually been through several changes of LUTs and color profiles because I've been at the studio for over 25 years. This isn't the first time, but this was the first time in a long time that we had done a big change, and I knew the potential was going to be great for us because the HDR grade is always challenging. Our palette has a lot of subtlety, and anything that gets a better range for us artistically, I was really into. The film's environments feel so full of life. Which tools did you develop to control the wind, water, and foliage movements? JB: There are so many aspects that go into foliage. We want the modelers not to model a plant traditionally—we want them to draw the plants but in 3D. They're using a stroke tool called Doodle to be able to author bushes and shrubs with more of an illustrative fash- ion. Then we set dress with something called Sprinkles, which is our art-directed paintable set dressing tool. But the key innovation on Wild Robot is not just the developing of those tools, but coupling them so that the same artist set dressing can decide, "I want to make a bespoke flower," and you just draw it on the fly in 3D and you're working between this camera space and 3D space and able to easily transition between the two. The same artist is the one thinking about the final image, not just, "I'm going to dress the world," but really thinking about, "How is this image con- structed? What are the assets that I need? How do I deconstruct them in the same asset, different levels in space?" So that's part of the toolset. The really interesting thing about the Doodle toolset is it's actu- ally building a 3D articulation rig as you're drawing. So all of these things can deform in the space, and those are the advantages that that you get doing this in 3D versus something like 2D cards. In 3D, the character can interact with these assets. They can blow in the wind. They can deform. You have all of the artistic freedom to draw whatever you want. They could be splatters of paint. They can be disconnected branches. They could be strokes. They don't have to make any sense at all physically. But they're just believable as a painter would approach the problem. Then you also can move these things in 3D space. This is a really interesting blend of 2D aesthetic, but a 3D world that's alive. You can walk through the space, you can have dynamic cameras, you can have painterly depth of field. You can have them blow in the wind. I think it gives the audience a real- ly rich experience because they're like, "I've never seen anything like this." It looks painted, but it's moving. RZ: I think we used to have a harder time because we were working in a lot of separate packages. Because most of this is Houdini work- flows, you could develop these processes, and they will actually just keep building on each other as you go. That used to be really tough when we had a separate lighting package and effects was using mul- tiple different packages. Modelers illustrated foliage in 3D using the Doodle stroke tool.