Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/196542
CG Animation ground looks like 2D because it's stylized, but this is a stereo film and you can truly see the depth of everything. The shots are beautiful. I wish they were longer. " To create the look, the artists preserved the geometry and original textures, but flattened the lighting and saturated the colors. For tools, they used a pipeline consisting of Autodesk's Maya and The Foundry's Nuke and Katana. "Our environments relied on the artistry of every color and lighting artist on every shot, Travers says. " Rather than composing shots with a photographer's eye, the team saw the shots as a painter might, looking at shapes and colors to balance the composition. "We'd pick plants and make them super-bright orange or turquoise, Travers says. "Usually " when you put shots into rendering and start adding lights, the texture becomes muted. When you flatten the lighting, you enrich the color. " Thus, a scene might have an eggplant-colored night scene with tangerine-colored plants. "It's a super-rich environment, " Travers says. "The artists would ask, 'Like this orange?' and we'd say, 'More orange.' I would tell people 'Good job' for mak- ing a shot un-integrated. It isn't what we usually do. " Although the images in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs were highly color saturated, Cloudy 2 pushes saturation even beyond the first film. "If someone tracked the record for the most saturated movie, I'm sure we broke it, Travers says. "It was unbelievable " how much we cranked the color. Digital projectors can capture it, but you will not see the whole richness and color on film. Film can't handle it. " The depth styling also created problems for Arnold, the raytracing-based renderer that Imageworks used. "We were breaking Arnold, Travers says. " " Arnold is not exactly rigid, but it is a disciplined, physics-based renderer, and the renders we got out of the box didn't look like what we wanted. The characters were all Arnold-centric. But, for these environments, we had to break Arnold into multiple passes and then rely heavily on compositing to adjust the mattes for anything in the background. " Travers points to other areas in which Arnold excelled. "We used global illumination a ton in this movie, he says. "There's " a shot of Chester, the bad guy, wearing a vest that glows, especially in the dark. We used the vest as a light source so, when he walks down a tunnel, we see the light from his vest 40 ■ CGW Sep t em ber / O c t ober 2013 casting on the walls. And, the cavern sequence is awesome. The interior of a mountain has rock candy and pools everywhere with caustics. People asked if we were really going to raytrace this. I said, 'This is what Arnold is for. Why have a raytracer if not to do something like this?' So we did full-blown raytracing, and it looks so pretty. " To maintain control over the composition, the artists would often dress the shots to the camera and sometimes even asked modelers to add geometry after animation. "It was a bit of a nightmare to do that, but it was worth it, Travers says. "The " whole point of the movie was to create a world we haven't seen before. It isn't photoreal. We could do whatever we wanted. There are frames in this movie that look like artwork. They couldn't be better balanced from a composition standpoint. " Cartoon Physics Inside this zingy world, effects animators needed to peel back and pare their physics-based simulations in ways that would fit the tangy actions. For simulation, the crew used Side Effects Software's Houdini and proprietary software. ■ TOP LEFT, animators used a cartoony, "UPA animation" style for main characters. Top right, integrating Impressionistic, painterly backgrounds with cartoony foregrounds was not, ahem, a piece of cake. "[Animation Supervisor] Pete Nash did an amazing job bringing characters to life in a whimsical world, Travers says. "But " the jumpy, jerky motion was difficult for the effects animators. My analogy is to Road Runner cartoons where you see a character pause and then drop quicker than gravity. Simulation software gets confused with that style of animation in a movie. " For shots with the characters shooting down coconut milk rapids, the effects artists applied physical simulation properties and then worked with scaling the simulation and the characters until the fluid had the consistency they wanted. The artists also sent the gooey maple syrup in a breakfast bog rocketing off to infinity with cartoon acceleration. "I look at some of the shots and marvel at them, Travers " says. "Ten years ago this wasn't even possible. We didn't have this capability of integrating the physically based simulations into a cartoony animation feature. " Sometimes shots had to go back to animators to adjust, but