Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/19812
n n n n Simulation the sun,” says Dave Goetz, art director. “Tere’s a sense of warmth about it and about her.” Te crew used similar techniques for the other characters’ hair, although the animators rarely needed to be inv olved in setting poses. “Flynn had contr ols on his front hair so the animators could animate on top of the simu - lation,” Canal says. “B ut mostly w e did the other hair, even the horse’s mane and tail, with simulation alone.” Disney Animation For the other characters, the technical chal - lenge was mor e subtle. “Te hair was obvi- ously the big thing, but the second goal was to make sure we raised the bar in CG anima - tion,” Canal says. “And I think we did. Having Glen Keane giving us notes was awesome.” Keane, who had animated such beloved Dis- ney characters as Ariel in Te Little Mermaid, the Beast in Beauty and the Beast, and the title roles of Aladdin, P ocahontas, and Tarzan, helped the team achiev e the classic Disney animation the directors loved. “Glen wanted the people to touch faces, scratch, things like that, ” Canal says. “So, we took a deformer-based appr oach for the faces and bodies that simulates muscles. It isn’t a muscle system, per se. We didn’t want a realistic look; we wanted a cartoony look, but one that’s fleshy and organic.” driven by controls. It does a lot without a lot of input, which is good because J ohn Kahrs, the other supervising animator, and I thought it was the hardest thing we’ve ever done.” Rather than a pipeline that mo ved a char - acter from modeling to rigging to animation, for the initial setup the crew worked in charac- ter-based groups of three to five people com- prised of modelers, riggers, and animators. “We all wor ked together in teams fr om the beginning,” Canal says. “I t was an open en - vironment where we could shar e and expr ess opinions. It was great.” Te idea for character teams originated with Bolt (see “Back to the F uture,” Novem- ber 2008), and Kaytis, who animated Rhino on Bolt, agrees with Canal. “Each person on the team learned what the other depar tment needed so well that we wouldn’t have to explain after a while,” Kaytis says. “I t was a gr eat pro- cess. It’s funny how the power of five people working on a problem is so much stronger than one person butting his head against the wall.” Tat same spirit of collaboration extended into the animation process. “Historically at Dis- ney, and this goes decades back, we’ve had char- acter supervisors rather than animation supervi- sors,” Kaytis says. “But on this film, we tried a different approach. We put the main characters in the hands of the entire crew. It was scary.” like a yearlong master class in animation.” Te first sequence the animation team worked on, the confr ontation between Flynn Rider and Rapunz el in the to wer, took two months. “G len would draw so much o ver those frames,” Kaytis says, “ what the ey elash shape should be, the cheeks in profile. We had to figure out how to do this animation, to have this girl walk around and feel for her. Everyone just chipped away.” And, the “ master class” continued. “G len was in dailies ev ery day ,” Kaytis says. “H e would stop on a pose, lean forward, and draw over the animation. Change a head angle. Push Flynn’s leg when he was leaping. He’s an animation genius. E very day it was like, ‘O h my God, I can’t wait for Glen Keane to draw over my stuff.’ “You look at mo vies from the ’50s— Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp—and you just know those are Disney films, but you don’t know how to make it happen, ” Kaytis continues. “I’ve wor ked at D isney for 16 y ears, and I think this is the first CG film with that look. It’s a huge leap. And a huge amount of that is because of Glen Keane.” While Keane pushed poses to make them better b y drawing on them, the dir ectors took a different appr oach. “B yron and I would get up and act out the scenes,” Greno Above at left, the crew referenced Disneyland as inspiration for the charming kingdom. Above at right, special rigs designed to help animators create subtle and emotional performances, such as these by Flynn and Pascal the chameleon, included blendshapes for micro controls. Because the characters w ear clothes, the crew put more resources into developing fa- cial rigs within A utodesk’s Maya that would help the animators cr eate subtle, emotional performances. “Tis is an intimate movie with lots of close-ups,” Canal says. “Te animators requested micr o contr ols. We added blend - shapes to hit micro targets.” Even so, Clay Kaytis, a supervising anima- tor on Tangled, describes the rigs as “ simple.” “Carlos did a great job of distilling the mo ve- ment of the face, ” Kaytis says. “ We work in Maya with a system of foundation shapes 30 November 2010 One reason for using this approach was that with dir ectors G reno (a former stor y ar tist) and Howard (a former animator), the dir ect- ing animator Keane, and two supervising ani- mators, there were already five people looking at the animators’ work. “So we didn’t add an- other gate,” Kaytis says. “We had the anima - tors take their work straight to dailies.” In dailies, Keane would pencil in his sugges- tions on a Wacom Cintiq, a display he could draw on with a stylus. “Glen would draw over the animators’ scenes and push to make them better,” Howard says. “For those guys, it was says. “Animation can get too broad and then it doesn’t feel r eal, especially in emotional areas. We created this world. We want it to be believable. So we’d speak of things that happen in our o wn lives. We wouldn’t say, ‘Tis character is about to cry.’ We’d de - scribe visiting someone in the hospital. Peo- ple connect with that and put it into their work. If you do the job right, these charac - ters become so real. Tey become people.” It Takes a Village Kaytis ev en extended this sense of cr eating people, not just characters, to the crowds. “We did the crowds basically all by hand,” he says. “We were stubborn about this. We wanted