Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/426320
36 cgw n o v e m b e r . d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 4 surface, you'll see a gradation, light that so ly turns into dark. We didn't want that in our show. Things would be lit or in shadow." For example, if Winston were in another fi lm, the light would so ly fall off the side of his head to show a rounded shape. In this fi lm, when a light is above Winston, only the top of his head and the bridge of his nose are lit. "We tried to build everything – from the chair, to the TV, to the characters – as simply as possible so the light shapes that resulted would be simple and clean," Staub says. R I G G I N G A N D A N I M A T I O N Rather than focusing on what happened inside a model, the rigging and technical anima- tion team concentrated on the silhouettes. "The posed shapes had to be simple, clean-lined, and designed," Staub says. "The animators looked carefully at shapes and silhouettes. Even when Winston is sitting or standing, his silhouette is graph- ic and very defi ned, without many bumps. There is no extra detail around the silhouette. We didn't want wrinkles in characters' clothing; we wanted it to be graphic. It's hard to do this, to make a rig that allows for clean, nice, elegant silhou- ettes. We had to give animators controls to simplify the edge of a shape. It was so important to not have complex silhouettes." Animators could turn on a view with fl at lighting that looked very close to the fi nal rendering. "It was important for the animators to work in the context of the fi lm as much as possible," Osborne says. "We approved shots out of technical animation with only fl at, surface shading." When the rig couldn't defi ne a shape in a smooth, elegant way, or the fl at lighting made a shape hard to see, the tech- nical animators could turn to SilSketch, a proprietary plug-in for Autodesk's Maya. "You can draw a line on a Wa- com Cintiq, and SilSketch makes a 3D blendshape," Osborne says. "It makes a model shape that matches the line and turns that shape on. You can blend in and out. We use it on every movie for very graphic statements." Also, to accent folds in skin and clothing that would otherwise be fl at because of the lighting, the artists used a proprietary tool called Meander. With Meander, which Disney's R&D team developed for "Paper man," artists draw on the CG images and the so ware accurately converts the hand- drawn lines into motion vectors. E F F E C T S Of the 80 shots in the animat- ed short fi lm, 60 had eff ects created by a team of 10 artists. "When you have food, you have eff ects," Staub says. "But what you get from a simulation out of the box wasn't what we were a er. We wanted every drop of ketchup, every piece of popcorn, to look natural but designed in the way it splats on the ground or pops out graphically. When James slaps a scoop of ice cream on the table, it had to have a shape we would paint, not one that would happen in the real world." Thus, the artists sometimes used a simulation as a starting point, and then changed it. Rigid-body dynamics might pour kibble into a bowl, but the artists would remove any bits that didn't bounce and land in the graphic way they wanted. When the cheese from the pizza slice stretched, Turley wanted it to break apart in clean, oval shapes. "We had a lot of hand-anima- LIGHT HITS CLEARLY DEFINED PLANES WITH NO FALL-OFF, AND THUS MAINTAINS WINSTON'S GRAPHIC DESIGN. " WE HAD TO FOCUS THE VIEWER'S EYE QUICKLY THROUGH VALUE, COLOR, SHAPE, AND DEPTH OF FIELD." STYLING THE FOOD: GO TO EXTRAS IN THE NOVEMBER.DECEMBER 2014 ISSUE BOX C G W. C O M