Computer Graphics World

March / April 2015

Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/491590

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 11 of 35

10 cgw m a r c h . a p r i l 2 0 1 5 for Home, worked with a sur- prisingly small crew of anima- tors to perform Tip, Oh, and the other characters in the film. "For a majority of the time, we had less than 20 animators, although during the last three weeks, it went up to 35," Reisig says. "We had a longer schedule than usual, so that allowed us to stay lean longer. There was a little ebb and flow, but even at its biggest, it was a small crew and a tight group." Because the film was primar- ily about Tip and Oh, everyone animated both the leading characters. "We had four supervisors, with a fih that came on at the end, and their teams were never bigger than six or seven," Reisig says. "The smaller group could focus on the characters and nail down the style of the film. The big challenge early on was the odd-looking Boov. How they moved. How alien they were. They have this elephant trunk nose where their ears are. Their color shis. They have six legs. There were a lot of unknowns. So we did a lot of exploration into what they would do." Because the Boov have six legs, the typical bipedal rig used for many characters wouldn't work. "Tim had specific ideas about how he wanted the legs to feel and the controls we'd create," Ramasubramanian says. "So, we kept the rig clean; it's designed to produce clean lines. The Boov don't have knees or feet. They have simple, small parts coming out from their belly. But, their legs don't go all the way into the body. When the characters stand, there's a little pressure on the bottom of that part of their leg, which creates a bit of a bulge. That's procedurally built in. When they straighten, the leg goes back to a cylinder. And, when they put a finger on the table, there's a slight bulge on the fingertip." Otherwise, the animators do the work, not the rig. "We created cycles, but for the most part when we wanted them to step and contact the ground with weight, we just had to do it," Reisig says. "We would do the front two like a normal fast walk, the ones behind and opposite at the same pace, and the ones on the sides more chaotic. That created a little bit of chaos, but organized chaos. A lot of times we'd plan shots by sliding the characters around and then planting the feet." The Boov can as easily walk sideways or backward as forward with their six legs. As they walk, they make a little bop, bop, bop noise when their balloon-like legs touch ground. "It was tricky," Reisig says. "Usually a legged character lis a foot to walk and creates a nice crease where the knee bends. When the Boov li a foot up, they squish up, like going from a long balloon to a round balloon. We used a single-axis squash- and-stretch control, and when we wanted more swing to the legs, we used FK on top of the IK. We wanted them to feel bouncy, like they were pushing their body into their feet and their shoulders into their body." A library of shapes for the nostrical helped the animators stay on model. "We curled it up carefully into a shape once, and then put it into the library," Reisig says. "It's kind of a tube, but it's also like a tail. We could bend it at any angle." P R I M O Tip brought the animators back to normal – she's a typical human biped. The challenge for the animators who performed her was in finding the personali- ty of a not-quite teenager. "Trying to animate a 12-year- old was surprisingly challeng- ing," Reisig says. "A lot of times we have cute little bouncy kids out of control or grown women to animate. Rarely do we have someone right in the middle. It's tricky finding the balance of not quite an adult and not a teenage girl. She's in a tough situation. She's separated from her mom, so that's a hard thing. But, she's also playful. She has to decide when it's OK to be fun, goofy, and awkward, and when she needs to be serious and take control." The character effects team managed Tip's hair and cloth simulations, but with Dream- Works' new Primo animation system, the animators could see the silhouettes. "We could see what her shorts did when she bent, and we knew where her hoodie was," Reisig says. "She puts her hands in her pockets and puts her hoodie on. Because we could see her with her actual hair and clothing, we knew when her hoodie hid her neck or face. It was all there in a simplified form. Having two characters in full high res has changed so much of how we work." Prior to this, the animators had to manage and limit a " I FELT I WAS DIRECTING A PERFORMANCE, NOT THE TECHNICAL CRAFT OF ANIMATION." TIP HAD SEVEN COSTUME CHANGES AND HER HAIR WAS RE-ARRANGED SIX TIMES.

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of Computer Graphics World - March / April 2015