Computer Graphics World

January 2009 23 CG I n n n n across its length. Compositors added shad- ows for any objects crossing the rays. "We could draw as many rays as we wanted," Bernasconi says. "And we could animate them to make them pulse. It was a nice way to produce an artistic result." Early in the film, for example, there's a scene with Pea and Despereaux. A bay win- dow behind Pea lights the whole room. "It's a huge light for Despereaux," says Armour. "It helped us create Despereaux's scale. It also creates a softer look, which pays hom- age to Vermeer." Populating the Kingdom Each of the worlds in Despereaux had its own set of characters—a community of mice in mouse world, thousands of rats in rat world, and the castle inhabitants and villagers in the human world. "Gary [Ross] had this amazing scope in the screenplay that we all loved," says Fell, noting that because Ross didn't know what was difficult in animation, he pushed the crew to do things they might not ordinarily try. For example, the sheer number of char- acters is double what you'd usually have in an animated film, Fell points out. While Ross concentrated on camera and lighting, Fell and Stevenhagen concentrat- ed on character animation. As he had done for Flushed Away, Fell created little biogra- phies for each main character, with arc and diagrams to show range of motion. For the five main characters, the mod- eling team worked from maquettes and drawings; for the rest, they used ortho- graphic drawings. For the crowds, the rig- ging team morphed standard male, female, boy, and girl models into variations. "We devised a system to generate over 200 unique crowd characters in different species and get diversity, particularly in their faces," says rigging supervisor Nico Scapel. "We had as many people doing faces as anything else. Framestore hadn't done a feature before, so they didn't set many boundaries. ey might have lim- ited the variety if they had had more expe- rience. But we managed to do it, and they got more than they expected. e care that went into each character, object, and envi- ronment is amazing." e riggers started with a universal face for each species, a mask they manipulated to create the various crowd characters. e mask could travel from one extreme face created by the modelers to another—an old face, perhaps, or a thin one. "We could then dial in regions of these different fac- es," Scapel says. "And, we had controls to sculpt portions of the faces." e riggers generated so many faces that they created catalogs of characters, and in- vited the directors in for "kill or keep" ses- sions. At the end, the directors settled on 90 humans, 60 mice, and 50 rats with unique geometry that the texturing department varied further. Surfacing artists could show the directors in real time, using OpenGL renders, those variations—a moustache, a different colored shirt, short hair, and so forth. "It was like real-time costume de- signing for the crowds," Bernasconi notes. For facial animation, the riggers built tools around shapes based on FACS ex- pressions, with a combination of deform- ers for sculpting controls. "Mostly, we used blendshapes that we applied to the univer- sal mask so we could transfer them from character to character," Scapel says. For cloth and hair simulation, the rig- gers devised a hybrid system that com- bined rigging controls and simulation. "We'd take the result of a cloth sim and use that as a corrective shape," Scapel says. "We basically baked it and put it back into the rig." e result gave the characters a specific look and saved calculation time. Similarly, Princess Pea's hair, which the stylists groomed using guide hairs and tubes representing vol- umes of hair, moved with a combination of rigging and simulation. "We ran a simula- tion on the tubes, which represented clumps of hair, but animators controlled the braids in front with rigs," Scapel says. For the princess's skirt and some crowd- character costumes, the riggers devised a simple system using dynamic curves. "Imagine a skirt becoming many vertical strings with a surface that goes between them," Scapel says. By manipulating the strings, the artists could control the size of the wrinkles or create a folded look. The sophisticated character designs, subtle lighting, soft textures, and live-action pacing caused directors Sam Fell and Robert Stevenhagen's team of 70 animators to balance "simple and real" for such delicate characters as Princess Pea, shown at left with her mother and father, and at right, with Roscuro and Despereaux.

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