Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546404
For Gerber, a significant challenge was the new Sofia. They had to bring her model into the updated CG style and still retain the feel of the original. "When you break it down and you take all the surfacing off of the original Sofia model, it's a weird model," he says. "She has a really big head. Her eyes are set really far apart. She had almost no nose to speak of. And if you lit that in the way that modern animated movies are lit in CG, she would look bizarre." He explains that the style worked in the original "because there were no shadows." In the end, it took intensive work with modeling and surfacing to achieve the effect he wanted. Advances in CG also played a major role in upping the production value. "The original Sofia was rendered with Mental Ray," says Art Director Francis this page: Departing from the original's pastels, Giglio brought a richer color palette to the new series, as well as more sophisticated lighting, to create cinematic feel. Giglio. "The new series is rendered with Arnold, which is a newer software that delivers more cinematic lighting." In addition, other advanced software enabled them to create more complex surfacing textures, including skin, fur, foliage, metallic elements, and special effects, resulting in quality more akin to a feature film. As for Charmswell, it was the biggest CG set built for any show that Gerber had produced and Giglio had worked on. "We designed the set at Disney Television Animation, but it was built in CG by ICON Creative Studio," says Gerber. "They initially were going to carve up the campus into smaller sets but ultimately decided to create one big set that included the entire school campus and surrounding grounds." "No matter where you were on campus, on the horizon line above the trees, you'd see the school," adds Giglio. "The trick to revisiting a show that already exists," says Gerber, was figuring out what absolutely must be kept and what should be changed: "It was a unique challenge to come back to this world and try to honor everything that people loved about it, while still making it fresh and exciting." FALL 2026 33