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n n n n CGI ert. In Dirt, the suspicious animal citizens who greet Rango wear clothes straight out of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. And the wary charac- ters in the saloon—mangy creatures, all—wear cowboy hats, vests, gun belts. Tree Mariachi owls comment on Rango’s prediction. Dressed in a red Hawaiian shirt, Rango is the stranger in town, a chameleon searching for an identity. So, after a quick look around the saloon, he picks one: a Western hero. Soon, through a series of accidental events, he becomes a hero, and the mayor appoints him sheriff. Tis is a spaghetti western, so Sheriff Rango will have to save the town from a series of evil plot twists and discover who he really is. Or, maybe not. skin quality, but in terms of the characters’ shape, the modelers focused on the artwork. Typically in animation studios, modelers work from maquettes sculpted from the char- acter designs; they rarely begin with the de- signs. With three weeks per character allotted for modeling, though, the ILM team decided to go straight into Autodesk’s Maya, much as they have done with visual effects characters. But, when questions about tiny details, such as the shape of the teeth and tongue, tied the approval process in knots, the modelers reined back and switched horses. Rather than trying to sculpt final models from the get-go in Maya, they created 3D ma- quettes in Pixologic’s ZBrush and posed them FEZ, a FACS-based system in Zeno, placed the shapes and categorized them. “Some of the things we modeled were quite grotesque,” Campbell says. “One model is a kid with a mullet. He’s from the animal world of Dirt, and he’s quite ugly. His fur is over- agitated where he was scratching. We’d look at him and burst out laughing in dailies. He was so pathetic. And another is a rodent character with gauze on his eye that we built into the model. All these little things. Each character had something unique that gave a sense of where these people are from. Sometimes tex- tures would handle it. Sometimes we’d model in bit of a scar or a bandage.” True Grit Steve Walton, who supervised the view paint- ers (texture painters), and Damian Steele, one of two look-development supervisors on the project, sat within spittin’ distance of each other during postproduction. “Damian sat at the next desk over,” Walton says. “Everything I do has to work for him, and he has requests for me. It’s a direct partnership. Damian refers to it as a three-legged race.” View painters, however, started producing At top, Dirt’s mayor, played by Ned Beatty, may look like a turtle, but he acts more like John Huston in Chinatown. At bottom, all the characters in Rango are animals, which meant they had fur, scales, or feathers—a difficult task made harder with multiple layers of costumes. Critters Geoff Campbell led a team of 12 model- ers who, working from McCreery’s artwork, sculpted the creatures and their costumes. “Crash quickly made it clear that we were to match the artwork,” he says. “We’d ask wheth- er Rango was more of a chameleon or a lizard, and he’d tell us it didn’t matter, that what we saw in the artwork was the character.” Refer- ence of actual animals would become impor- tant later, especially for the look-development artists who paid attention to such things as 12 March 2011 to match the artwork. Te maquettes showed Verbinski and McCreery that the modelers understood the proportions and quality the director and designer wanted. And with that approval, the artists began working in Maya on sculpts that the riggers could prepare for animation, the view painters could texture, and to which the look-development artists could assign materials for rendering. For facial animation, the modelers moved the charac- ters into ILM’s proprietary Zeno program to hand-sculpt shapes used to form expressions. texture maps for the characters a bit ahead of the look-dev technical directors, who jumped in toward the last half of view painting. For Rango alone, Walton estimates the paint- ers created 120 separate effects maps and 20 color maps. “He’s a chameleon,” Walton says. “Tings happen to him.” Modeler Frank Gravatt worked on Rango’s shape and scales, which he built individually by hand. “Any time Rango changed, Frank had to go in and reapply the scales,” Steele says. “It was like tiling a bathroom.” Walton added the small- er details on top, creating maps that defined the skin’s shininess and translucency. Ten, the look-dev artists applied the materials, which drive the Pixar RenderMan shaders, and gener- ated the hair using an ILM-specific process. “Tat’s when we had to consider the size of the character,” Steele says. “Light diffuses through an object at a certain rate per centi- meter, so when you light with subsurface scat- tering, it is brighter on a small creature than on one the size of, say, Arnold Schwarzeneg- ger. When there’s a lot of scattering, things look babyish and sweet. So, when we rendered Rango, we treated him like a six-foot-tall crea- ture. Also, a lot of RenderMan attributes are scale dependant. You have to work out how lighting affects shadow details and bump details early on, so we work closely with the view painters. We render the creatures in as many situations as possible to try to figure out