Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/30784
CGI n n n n Paquette tried to use the original model, but that dog hadn’t been designed to talk. “I did a quick lip-sync test, and it looked rudimentary, almost sub-video-game quality,” Paquette says. “We knew we couldn’t do this.” The redesign took nearly two months. The modelers changed the dog’s face to make him seem more appealing, moving the eyes closer together, making the pupils bigger and the brows thicker. They changed his mouth, and they made him fleshier. “It took a while to pinpoint the things that would make him feel more like a dog, but we got to the point where, standing by himself, he felt like an organic bulldog,” Paquette says. “And then once we changed the model, we had to re-rig it from scratch to make sure the skin was weighted correctly to the skeleton.” As for the drool, “we did trial and error,” Paquette says. “We tried to see if it would be worthwhile for the animators to do it, but it became too time-consuming.” Instead, the animators turned the drool over to the simu- lation team, which sent it elsewhere. “It’s just smoke and mirrors from the effects depart- ment,” says Keith Stichweh, character simula- tion supervisor. With the new rig and new model in place, Paquette created key poses for Luiz’s perfor- mance. He started by looking at video refer- ence of bulldogs and at friends’ bulldogs. Then, he pitched key shots to the director using pen- cil tests. “I like to draw, and the pencil tests cut the time in half or more because it’s such a quick way to do gestures, choreography, poses, blocking,” he says. “I can go through multiple iterations, while someone working on a model might take double the time to get one.” And all that work gave Luiz the opportunity to play a critical role. Although the kidnappers have chained Blu and Jewel together, they Camera Moves To help create the live-action feeling of Rio, director Carlos Saldanha’s friend Renalto Falco, a Brazilian-born live-action cinematographer, worked with the layout artists who created Rio’s camera moves. “Having a director of photogra- phy is new to Blue Sky,” says Rob Cardone, layout supervisor. “The initial idea was that he would consult on camera, lighting, and story arcs like a live-action DP would. But as production went on, the focus for our DP became more in the camera phase.” Layout artists set the initial camera and staging, working from storyboards and a low-resolution, exploratory version of the set that was often as simple as cubes and cylinders. They work with camera rigs and lenses that mimic live- action cameras. “We have a dolly track the camera can follow, a crane” says Karyn Mon- schein, layout technical lead. “We can add camera shake and subtle move- ments. And on this film, we added things to fake depth of field in our playblast.” Once the director approves the camera moves in the low-resolution set, the files move to set design and modeling. When real geometry for props and set pieces are in place, the layout team checks the camera and the sets, and sends the sequences for approval. At this stage the cameras pointing to the action in one set might extend over several shots, so once the director has ap- proved the sequences, the layout artists break the massive files into individual files for animation. “Each animator gets one camera per file with only the char- acters and set pieces in their shot,” Monschein says. Two camera artists attend all the animation dailies and take notes so that if the camera moves need to change, the layout artists can make those changes. “We’ve learned that if everyone can change the camera, everyone will change the camera,” Cardone says. Once the director approves the shot in animation, everything is locked down so the rest of the pipeline can finish. “I think that the camera in this movie is the most exciting we’ve produced,” Cardone says. “We’ve had the most freedom, and it shows. The camera is really dynamic.” –Barbara Robertson manage to meet Rafael (George Lopez), a tou- can. “When Raffi saw the two birds chained together, he knew to take them to Luiz,” Pa- quette says. “Luiz doesn’t really know what he’s doing, but he frees them, and Blu rides on his back to the Carnival. Luiz’s role is to help Blu and Jewel get to the place they need to be faster.” Rafael, Blu, and Jewel appear in Rio’s lush jungles. Because animators wanted to manipulate the birds’ flight feathers at the wing tips as if they were fingers, the rigging crew developed new methods for describing the feathers. Chain Reaction Before Luiz frees the two birds, the animators had to create performances for Blu, Jewel, and the chain between them. For the chain, they re- lied on a system designed by the character sim- ulation department, a new department created for this film. Because the studio uses Maya, the simulation department decided to start with nCloth and customize it as needed. “We didn’t have a cloth-simulation solution,” says Stich- weh. “We had eight months to put it together and integrate it into a pipeline the company had developed over the past 20 years.” One customization handled the chain. “Think of a ribbon made with polygon faces chained together, a 50x1 ribbon of polygons,” Stichweh says. “I can turn this ribbon into cloth, control stretching and sheering and the center, and constrain links. It’s like a poor April 2011 13