Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1532337
www.postmagazine.com 31 POST JAN/FEB 2025 as you go. That used to be really tough when we had a separate lighting package, and effects was using multiple different packages." Jeff Budsberg: "I think the takeaway is that on Wild Robot, there's not just a modeler 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 [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 act- ing 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 disciplines in ways that they hadn't done before." How did you approach the film's production design? Raymond Zibach: "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 department, surfacing and adding all these textures. We broke everything down be- cause 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 mod- eling so much. When you think about modeling organic geometry in Maya, it's pretty painstaking. And now they're drawing and painting and creat- ing 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." Jeff Budsberg: "That level of meticulous con- struction 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 deconstruct it differently, and you would use a different bush depending on how far it is off the camera. We call this a level of artistic detail. "We had to go back to this collaboration be- tween art and technology. We would come up with ideas of things that we could pursue on the execu- tion 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 ste- reotypical computer-generated imagery. Having techniques to add a feathered edge — almost like a brush running over a textured paper — or smudg- ing 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 re- ally great painterly assets, but we can push it even further 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) — traditional- ly you have one on this pixel, you have one position or one normal. But with feathered transparency, that doesn't work because you see through the ob- jects. So if you wanted to filter things, we needed to extend the Cryptomatte data format to be able to do some of these very clever spatial filters on the compositing operation. "Having these tools at the artists' disposal, as op- posed to something that's just like a procedural filter, was so critical because you feel the artist's hand." Raymond Zibach: "Because great painters are ac- tually great editors that are choosing what to show off and what to change, and what to manipulate to show their point of view. Now we have those tools, and we can work fast enough. I think that was the problem before. You could maybe have something that could emulate what we did, but it would be painstaking." Jeff Budsberg: "We have all these tools at our disposal. But if you can bring some of that forward into the asset construction, it makes your job so much easier. You still have all those incredible things that you can do later to manipulate the image. You would never make a realistic bush and filter the bush to make it look painterly. If you want a painterly plant, draw the plant." Raymond Zibach: "You don't want to be filter- ing stuff later to cover up something you don't like. What we ended up with was every asset just looked so cool that it could stand on its own. When you want to blend it in, it's going to look great, too. Because that was kind of an older mindset, 'Alright, we're just going to filter out the reality of stuff.' But this just ended up being way more targeted." Do you have any advice for artists interested in pursuing a career in animation? Raymond Zibach: "It depends on where you're at as far as your animation journey, but I always recommend keeping a sketchbook. I think it's just great for yourself to always be drawing. Whether you're going to end up hand drawing your anima- tion or not, I think a skill set of always designing a bit for yourself is really important. I think that's why Jeff is such a strong visual effects guru and master. He also has a very traditional background in art, and I think that's really important for animation. "The other exciting thing about animation is you can really find out a lot online just for yourself, and that I think is amazing. You can find all the differ- ent places to go and learn, and then learning even from YouTube. There's just so much out there that we didn't have growing up in this business. I think that's really exciting for people that are curious about animation." Jeff Budsberg: "It's all about the quality versus the quantity. I don't want to see a five-minute piece that's subpar. Show me five seconds that blow me away. That requires a discipline that is difficult to grow because you have to not only execute the work, you have to be almost like a painter when you think about, 'What am I trying to do? Where am I trying to guide the eye? What am I trying to achieve?'" Raymond Zibach: "Having a point of view and what kind of statement you're trying to make is really key. It's all about communicating. What are you trying to get across? Is it coming across strong enough? Walk away from it. Come back. Is it com- ing through for you? That's such a big discipline." Jeff Budsberg: "Ask your buddies. Have some- one else look at it, get their feedback, and don't take it personally. It's not a reflection on you. You're always just trying to make it better. I think that's the big takeaway. I think it's less important to learn very specific pieces of software and more important to learn the fundamentals behind them." DreamWorks animated the entire film. Roz was intentionally designed without a mouth.