Computer Graphics World

January 2009 21 CG I n n n n a natural curve," he explains. "I wanted to move through the 3D space as if it were a painting brought to life." When Ross moved the camera through so-called mouse world, he wanted to do so using a mouse-size camera. "Gary asked what the depth of field would be in mouse world if we were shooting with a mouse- size camera focused two centimeters from the lens," Blackbourn says. "So, we built a mouse-size crane and dolly rigs. en Gary would say, 'e shot is beautiful, but it's too perfect. I can feel the computer in this. What can we do?' So we put grains of sand on the dolly track." e sand was, in fact, bumps on the camera curves. Keys to the Kingdom Mouse world was one of many environ- ments in Despereaux's Kingdom of Dor de- signed by Tomov, all within an aesthetic he chose early in the film's development. "Ev- geni has been the consistent visual voice throughout the whole process," says Fell. For the environments, Tomov looked to such 15 th and 16 th century Flemish towns as Bruges, Belgium, and Amsterdam for in- spiration. "e goal was to create a parallel, imagined world through textures and light- ing," he says. Tomov also referenced the Flemish painter Vermeer's use of light and shadows to direct the viewer's attention, es- pecially in the human and mouse worlds. "e human world is the least surprising," Tomov says. "We tried to make it stylish and entertaining. e most amazing room is the huge kitchen in the castle where they cre- ate the annual soup." For this, he designed a huge and complex, Rube Goldberg-like, wooden soup-making machine. Tomov gave the mouse world, which is close to the kitchen, a different mood. "It's a restrictive world where the mice are taught to be afraid. ey celebrate the rules they live by: austerity, discipline, uniformi- ty. So, it's disturbingly neat and fastidious, and the colors are muted." A third world hides deep below the cas- tle's dungeon. is is the dark rat world, where the mouse council throws disobedi- ent little mice. For this more chaotic world, Tomov moved from Vermeer to Hierony- mus Bosch for inspiration. "is world has more extreme lighting," he describes. "It's more grotesque, a marriage aesthetically be- tween the declining Roman empire and an anarchistic medieval look." e rat world has an evil emperor and a coliseum with a nasty house cat chained inside a cage. To realize Tomov's designs, Framestore put 25 primary characters, 12 secondary characters, and crowds, most of them furry, in 60 complex environments. "e environments range from the storerooms where the mice live, to a big banquet hall with beautiful pillars and staircases, to the rat world, to a farmyard," says Ben Lambert, who supervised the 10 modelers at Framestore who created the characters and an inventory of props that mushroomed into the thousands. "We knew from the storyboard which models would be close up, and they had extra de- tails, but most of the props people see in the movie are also subdivision surface models." e modelers relied on Autodesk's Maya, using Autodesk's Mudbox and Pixologic's ZBrush for final touches. "One of our main challenges was being aware of the silhouette so that the props didn't look overly CG," Lambert says. "Everything you see has some wear and tear on it, like slightly cracked edges. What really helped us was putting a slight curve on the edge, a little bit of displacement mapping to break up the straight lines you get with CG models. We modeled as much of that detail as we could." Similarly, for the surfaces, Tomov asked for painted rather than photographic tex- tures. "Evgeni didn't want the surfaces to be photoreal," says Xavier Bernasconi, surfac- ing and lighting supervisor at Framestore. "He wanted to use detailed textures, but he wanted us to lose the edge of the detail. So we had to brush away the high-frequency At top: Riggers devised a system for generating hundreds of unique characters, including these mouse children. At bottom: A mask created for a universal face in each species helped the riggers quickly create animation tools for disparate characters.

• Cover