Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/426320
38 cgw n o v e m b e r . d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 4 They never, however, drew lines around an external shape. L I G H T I N G "Lighting was where we achieved the look of the visual development," Staub says. "We could get good clean shapes in the silhouette and in the animation and technical animation. We created the look with simple light shapes, edge breakup noise, and swinging color." To create the light shapes, artists used a hybrid process with 3D lights and painted shapes. "Everyone on the lighting team was also a painter," Staub says. "So, a lot of the work was done by painting light shapes in [Ado- be's] Photoshop and projecting them into the background in Nuke. In fact, we asked for Jeff's lighting keys – the entire Photo- shop document, which might have 50 layers – and gave them to the artists to see his process." The lighting artists might begin with simple light shapes created in the studio's 3D light- ing system, called DLight, and use those shapes as a starting point. Oen, though, they would replace them with the painted light shapes. "No matter how simple we made the geometry, there was no way to avoid too much complexity when a 3D light hit it," Staub says. "The moment we introduced self-shadowing or complex geometry shadow- ing, it stopped looking like our movie. Sometimes the most appealing shape was a line of light cutting through a body." To achieve that look, they created a "plane tool." "Think of it as a 3D roto shape that we animated through a scene," Staub says. "It would follow a character, and that would be a rim light. When Winston was running through a scene and we wanted him to get hit with light, instead of putting a 3D light out of the box on him like we nor- mally would, we took a plane in Nuke and sliced it through where he was running." That put light on one part of his body and le the rest dark. Equally important, his legs and ears didn't cast shadows on his body. "We let the environment cast shadows on him and let his body cast shadows, and that was enough," Staub says. B R E A K I N G E D G E S , S W I N G I N G C O L O R The simple models, controlled silhouettes, flat shading, and light shapes created a look that matched the visual development and Turley's test image, but it wasn't enough. They needed to, as Osborne described it, make the edges fall away. "We didn't want a painterly look," Staub says. "What we wanted was a breakup that looked like you ripped a piece of paper cleanly. We had it happen internally, not just the on edges, so we didn't have defined edges. All the pixels on the screen would get pushed and pulled based on a noise pattern and how much the artists wanted to push and pull the pixels." The process happened in Nuke aer rendering, which was accomplished using Disney's new, proprietary renderer Hyperion (see "Science Project," page 30). "Normally, if you apply noise, like a filter, when a character animates, you get a screen blur effect as the character moves through the noise pattern," Staub says. "So instead, we created a procedural noise pattern on every animated ob- " EVERY NODE IN OUR NUKE GRAPHS IS AN ARTISTIC DECISION." WINSTON AND HIS FOOD ARE NEARLY ALWAYS CENTERED IN THE FRAME. SHALLOW DEPTH OF FIELD ALSO KEPT THE FOCUS ON WINSTON.