Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1530710
JB: I think the takeaway is that on Wild Robot, there's not just a mod- eler and a surfacer and a lighter—the gamut of skill sets is blending. The surfacer is drawing assets as well as thinking about lighting, the artist in CFX [character effects] for the groom—which never thinks about lighting and shading—has to think about how to make the groom in a way that looks aesthetically painterly at the end of the day. The lighters are acting like painters, how they manipulate the space with light and filters and colors. I think it allowed everyone to become even stronger artists because they're reaching across disci- plines in ways that they hadn't done before. How did you approach the film's production design? RZ: As the tools were getting targeted and developed by Baptiste [Van Opstal] and Jeff, we'd come back to the art and go, "What are those designs?" Because a lot of times on the production design side, you have an aspiration for how far you can push the look, and then you have the limitation of what's actually possible. But on this film, with the development that Jeff and Baptiste did right away with Ritchie [Sacilioc], the art director, I was like, "Alright, looks like they can do it all. Let's create these pages." We are creating either silhouettes for modelers or our look dev de- partment, surfacing and adding all these textures. We broke every- thing down because we knew the potential for them to actually do it all was there, because I think a lot of times the "art to art direction" is a shorthand for what it's going to be. But we were like, "No, this is exactly what they can do." That Doodle tool ended up speeding up modeling so much. When you think about modeling organic geometry in Maya, it's pretty painstaking. And now they're drawing and painting and creating a skeleton and a preview texture that looks like a brushstroke all at the same time. I'm not waiting three departments down to see what the heck this thing is going to really look like. JB: That level of meticulous construction would take days to a week for a bush. It allows us to approach the problem with a level of artistic deconstruction. You might draw the same bush three times but de- construct it differently, and you would use a different bush depend- ing on how far it is off the camera. We call this a level of artistic detail. We had to go back to this collaboration between art and technol- ogy. We would come up with ideas of things that we could pursue on the execution side. Raymond's team would go back and try to push the envelope of what they could do. Some of the critical innovations revolved around brushed edges, because that's something that's very stereotypical computer-generated imagery. Having techniques to add a feathered edge—almost like a brush running over a textured paper—or smudging nearby assets together to get something that feels like wet-on-wet painting. We call it badger brushing, where we take a really stiff type of brush and smear those edges. We already have these really great painterly assets, but we can push it even fur- ther into something that's really novel. We had these great spatial filters developed on Bad Guys and Puss in Boots. You want to push that to the next level, but the challenge on Wild Robot is everything has this feathered transparency. All of our AOVs [arbitrary output variables]—traditionally you have one on this pixel, you have one position or one normal. But with feathered trans- Lupita Nyong'o voiced the film's lead character, Roz.