Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/196542
CG AnimAtion .com VIDEO: Go to "Extras" in the September/October 2013 issue box ■ ANIMATORS gave the carnivorous Double Bacon Cheespider, one of the most dangerous foodimals, the same weight and type of performance as a visual effects monster. we cue from a UPA-style of animation, which is an extremely limited animation, Beveridge says, referring to the studio that " produced such cartoon characters as Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing-Boing. "But, UPA limitations didn't determine how everything moved, Beveridge continues. "The concept does. Some of " the food-character designs are funnier when we animate them like believable visual effects creatures with strong weight. Others are funnier if they don't move because the design itself is so funny. Every character was different. We had only one overall rule: Any change has to be funnier. We'd go with whatever made the directors laugh. " From all accounts, the most difficult character was Barry the strawberry. "It was tricky to keep Barry on model and have him look good with all the seeds, Pearn says. "We had to subtract " seeds around his mouth. " Cameron provided Barry's voice. "Barry had to emote, " Cameron says. "He became one of our key leads in the film. We had a big conversation happening between design and animation. " Shape and Bake All told, there are approximately 50 food-based characters, 10 human stars, and thousands of extras, including the Livecorp nerds where Flint works and the citizens of Sanfranjose. Flint and his friends all appear throughout the film. "It's a buddy film, so most shots have the entire group, " Beveridge says. "We overhauled how the faces work to give the animators more intuitive controls, but the bodies are almost identical under the hood to the characters in the first film. One advantage of a sequel, though, is that we could perfect and harness in our design rules. We were more brutal about the eye shapes, which we felt were a little mooshy in the last film. We made them sharper and clearer. " To resurrect the character models and rigs used for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, the team created what Visual Effects Supervisor Pete Travers calls a "back-in-time snapshot" of that previous film. "We brought back the same versions of software, the same 36 ■ CGW Sep t em ber / O c t ober 2013 rigs, even the same hardware, Travers says. "We even put the " turntables of the characters into the old version of QuickTime. It was an interesting experiment. Once we had done that, the R&D department brought everything we wanted from the past into the Cloudy 2 production environment, and we went from there. It was remarkably successful. " Because the crew needed to serve up the population of Swallow Falls again in this film, they also revived the crowd system used on the first film. However, when the action moved from the tiny Swallow Falls Island into the more complex world of Livecorp and the Greater Sanfranjose area, the directors asked for more diversity. Kellman again provided the artwork. "He must have done 50 sketches of nerd-like employees, Travers says, and added, " laughing, "He probably had plenty of reference here at our company. Model Supervisor Marvin Kim and his crew then " had to scramble those shapes into a palatable and manageable crowd system. "In most crowd systems, you have a mondo character from which you create lots of variety, Travers says. "You build " 'guy A' and try to build 'guy B' out of that topology, and if that doesn't work, you modify the topology. " Eventually, the modelers sculpted a topology from which they could create a variety of body types and mix those with multiple hairstyles. "People often think of rigging as bones and joints, but our mondo rig would access model shapes, like blendshapes, Travers says. The result was akin to applying a " facial animation system to an entire body. "You could move a slider, and a head would morph into another shape, Cameron says. The trick was in rolling out a " system in which the animation snippets would work with all the different body types. "Short nerds walk differently than tall nerds, Travers says. " "So, we had a character-creation engine that would semi-bake out the character, and animators would create specific cycles for those characters. That required a little more brute force on the back end, but it was far more effective. " Travers estimates the maximum number of individual characters they created with this system at 4,000. "That was for an