Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/457057
30 cgw j a n u a r y . f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 5 C ' M O N M A R I A N N E All told, the film has six hero characters – Marianne, Dawn, Prince Charming, Bog, Grisel- da, and Sunny. The secondary characters include a Sugar Plum Fairy, an impish flying mouse, Bog's sidekicks Stuff and Thang, Marianne and Dawn's father the King who looks a touch like George Lucas, several gob- lins, and more elves. Several real-world creatures inhabit the forest, as well – butterflies, ladybugs, frogs, one armored squirrel that Prince Charming rides into battle, and more. The Bog King, his mother, and the goblins are on the dark side of the woods. The fairies and elves are on the light side. Real- world creatures are on both. "Because everyone knows what a real butterfly, ladybug, and frog look like, we had to incorporate our fantasy characters into the real world," Plett says. "We did that with detail – hyper, hyper detail. In some shots, you can see pores where hair goes into the skin. We found that as long as we kept the geometry stylized, we could push detail as far as we wanted. We used displacement and bump mapping to extreme amounts. We never knew what would be in focus, so we had to texture what we could." Even though the characters had real-world textures, by stylizing them and making their geometry slightly different from humans, the elves and fairies never entered the uncanny valley. "We moved away from a human design, but we wanted to keep human details and subtlety with pores, wrinkles, and huge detailing around the eyes," Sumner says. "I think the hyper- realistic detail in these carica- tures makes it a unique film." The enormous amount of detail in the characters and the environment created another issue, however: too much infor- mation in a single frame. "We had to take a photo- graphic approach," Plett says. "We used lighting to focus and isolate characters and depth of field to help us see these small- scale creatures. It was very tricky at first. Your first inclina- tion in CG is to see everything." To help the audience under- stand how tiny these characters are, the camera was oen low. "We tried to play the scale as close to real world as we could," Plett says. "The characters are three to six inches tall. Ants come up to their knees. We tried to use a low-level angle and always have something recognizable – a daisy or dogwood plant or flower that would tell us the scale." C R A Z Y L I T T L E T H I N G C A L L E D L O V E When Rydstrom joined the production, the basic story remained the same, but he changed things around what he calls "the edges." A new row of primroses appeared along the border between the dark forest and the fairies' world. He also gave Bog a mother – Grisel- da – and the two competing assistants Stuff and Thang. "The movie had been around for years with different waves of people involved when George [Lucas] and [Lucasfilm CEO] Kathy Kennedy asked me to take it over," Rydstrom says. "There was a crew in place and an art department. What hadn't started in earnest was the animation, aside from tests. The nature of the schedule was such that we had to go into production quickly. Shortly aer I started, we were sending sequences down the pipeline to get animated. We reworked the story, so we were animating part of the story even though we weren't sure what the final story would be." Fortunately, modelers and rig- gers working in Autodesk's Maya had already prepared characters. "We had a huge catalog of assets set up within an earlier pipeline that used our Viewpaint texturing soware and Lux lighting within Zeno," Sumner says. "But, the studio had moved to Katana for lighting, Mari for lookdev and texture painting, and an Alembic caching system. So, we devel- oped a hybrid system. We had a conversion method that pub- lished the assets into the newer formats, but we could go back to the earlier pipeline if needed." Animation Supervisor Kim Ooi led the team of approximately 40 animators in Singapore who worked on the film. "We also had five or six animators in San Francisco working on a couple sequences," he says, "the dun- geon sequence where Marianne finds Dawn, and the "Strange Magic" sequence where you see Bog and Marianne fly out into the dark forest and he shows her the beauty of the place." Ooi had been involved with story development for the film, tracing back to around 2011, and then moved into production about two years ago. "In the development stage, we figured out the animation style and design," Ooi says. "The amount of realism varies between the characters, but we maintained a realistic feel throughout. The main characters needed a full range of emotions and subtle performances, so we didn't want to go too cartoony. " W E FOUND THAT AS LONG AS WE KEPT THE GEOMETRY STYLIZED, WE COULD PUSH DETAIL AS FAR AS WE WANTED."