Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/589428
10 cgw s e p t e m b e r . o c t o b e r 2 0 1 5 Development Supervisor Sabine Heller, Rigging Supervisor Justin Leach, Lead Materials Technical Director Nikki Tomaino, and Materials Supervisor Brian Hill – to wrestle CG technology into forms that could honor Schulz's minimalist style in fully formed 3D characters. The artists decided to de- velop all the characters' bodies from the model of Charlie Brown that took 18 months to develop, morphing heads and changing clothes to fit each character's design. The magic that blended the 2D designs with the 3D characters hap- pened in rigging. "Our normal approach for rigging didn't work out," Heller says. "In Sparky's profiles, the head shape can change, the nose moves down, and the ears drop. So we created character views in the rig. An animator could select 'Sparky three-quar- ters' (which is more like one quarter), push a button, and it would happen." Each child had six head poses – profile right, one-quarter right, profile le, one-quarter le, extreme down, and extreme up. "The majority of the time, the head shape stays the same, but the nose, eyes, and ears slide around," says Supervising Anima- tor Nick Bruno. "If I were to rotate the head and the head shape changed, the eyes would become distorted. We had to keep everything in real-world space in the same direction, but we had to move all the parts. So, to hit all the poses Sparky drew, we built a Mr. Potato Head system of parts that we could move, slide, switch out, and replace." Eventually, the animators, modelers, and riggers would create hundreds of poses. "It was like stop motion," Bruno says. "Otherwise, it would have been impossible to keep the characters on model. But, in stop motion, animators take off a head and replace it. We have switches for the heads that blend between targets." To connect and disconnect the heads, the riggers devel- oped a "suction cup" plug-in for Autodesk's Maya. "It's a hybrid rig that uses shrink-wrap in Maya," Heller says. "We have two separate meshes, but they render as seamless as one mesh. We can rotate Snoopy's head up so it looks like a bowling pin and it stays attached. We can move his head over and it stays." D R A W T H E L I N E S Schulz was able to give his hand- drawn characters expressions seemingly with a flick of his pen- cil. But while his 2D characters might have dots for eyes, the CG characters' eyes needed to be 3D objects. Sometimes shaped like dots, sometimes shaped like sixes and nines. "We needed to create a spe- cific style," Heller says. "Charles Schulz drew very specific eyes with expression lines that we in- terpreted as a nine or a six. And he also had a pair of wrinkles that we call periwinkles." A custom rig made it possible for the eyes and eyebrows to ride on the surface of the models. "We had a lot of special technology to move shapes across topology," Heller says. "We didn't want to change the volume. When an animator pulls the eyebrow down, a custom plug-in creates a blink." In addition to typical controls for moving the characters' heads, animators could pose the floating elements using controls within the rig. "They'll follow the surface," says Supervising Animator Scott Carroll. "But, we can move them independently." The animation supervisors gave libraries of poses to each of the 80-plus animators and sent each to "school" for three weeks of course work to learn what they could and could not do; what was within the style and what was not. "We had to teach them which poses to use and when," Carroll says. "Picking the poses was key. Some artists thought they'd feel limited by having to stick to these poses, but they found it liberating. They were able to be creative within the Peanuts universe." The poses extended to the characters' entire bodies as well as to their heads and facial expressions. "Charlie Brown's arms have to grow for him to reach over his melon of a head," Bruno says. "We switch from the default four-finger pose to A FLEXIBLE RIG MOVED SNOOPY'S HEAD INTO A BOWLING PIN SHAPE. A PAINTING BY CHARLES SCHULZ HANGS BEHIND THE COUCH.