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14 cgw s e p t e m b e r . o c t o b e r 2 0 1 5 tors a big sphere to use as a visual guide, but the final cloud is made from small spheres converted to volumetrics and the scanned drawings of dust specs. "We wanted something that had depth, to look good in stereo," Pinkhas says. "We didn't want just pen strokes. So, we added the volumetric elements – poofs of dust. The arc at the top of each sphere is represented as a pen stroke. We used a rig to control the size of the poofs and their speed, and added noise to skew and squish some of the arcs. We also controlled the motion of the dust specs. Usually we let the physics simulation do its thing, but for this movie we needed more control." Similarly, the crew stylized water to create a look and animation style that fit into the Peanuts universe. "To get a staccato feeling in the animation, there's no motion blur," Pinkhas says. "So we needed to figure out how to make our effects read well without motion blur." For water, they used the shape of the water drops to create a motion-blur illusion. "Rather than spheres that look blurred when rendered with refraction, we modeled elongated water drops into the shapes the motion blur would represent," Pinkhas says. "It was the same with splashes. We sculpted them frame by frame, or every few frames, using shapes in Sparky's style." These tiny models of rain- drops look like Charles Schulz's pen line. By instancing the models to particles and holding back the particles on every other frame, the effects artists cleverly matched the animation style. "Wrestling effects into shape was really challenging for the ef- fects crew," Cavaleri says. "They had to think about every frame like a 2D effects animator. Our tools were not made for that. But the effects came out great." W O B B L E S I N T H E N E I G H B O R H O O D The crew's respect for Schulz's line and their determination to reproduce the comic strip as faithfully as possible extended into the backgrounds, as well. "Sparky was the spirit of every thing we designed," Dun- nigan says. "We looked to his strips for inspiration and found great landmarks. The living room with the couch. The thinking wall. The kite-eating tree. The doghouse. Then we had to learn how to draw like Sparky. Steve's [Martino] mantra was, 'Where do we find the pen line?' " They started with Snoopy's doghouse. "We did drawings and sculp- tures, trying to keep the wiggly lines and beveled edges without having the doghouse look old or rubbery," says Jon Townley, lead set designer. "From there, we went to snow, other edges, and trees. We had to train ourselves to put the right wobble in the clapboard, to have the right frequency in the snow blobs and branches." They wanted an asymmetric look, something more playful than typical CG environments, more organic. But as they began to move from the doghouse into the neighborhood, they realized that Schulz didn't draw estab- lishing shots. "He drew dialog and char- acters, and pieces and parts of the neighborhood," Dunnigan says. "Windows, rooops. So for reference, Steve Martino and Craig Schulz went to St. Paul, Minnesota, and took photos of the neighborhoods where Charles Schulz grew up." Then, working from the script and story beats, they designed the neighborhood. The house where the Little Red-Haired Girl lives, across the street from Charlie Brown. The baseball field. The school. The shooting style, however, introduced technical problems in the newly created CG neighbor- hood. To match the comic strip's flat look, the crew had decided to shoot with long lenses. "Charlie is like a basketball on a body," Martino says. "We didn't want his head to balloon out and look odd." Moreover, they kept the camera about three feet off the ground, and sometimes lower for Snoopy. "It was astonishing how much we had to massage the other elements in the frame to PEPPERMINT PATTY ' S PENCIL TEST Animator BJ Crawford did one of the first tests using hand- drawn animation to explore poses from the comic strip while trying to capture the sensibility of motion from the original television specials. "The scene is Peppermint Patty dialing up Charlie on the phone, then hopping off the chair," Crawford says. "To prepare myself, I went through the comic strips and tagged iconic sce- narios I liked. The props are all oversized, so she has to hold the phone with two hands. I tried to maintain the original propor- tions, poses, and expressions as much as I possibly could while translating the graphic style into animation." Later, Crawford found himself assigned to drawing 2D animation that would appear in thought bubbles. He worked in TVPaint Developpement's TVPaint Animation soware. "It was hard," Crawford says. "I'd go through the comic strips to try to find an exact panel so I could match the line weight as closely as possible to my image. I learned so much. Once I roughed out the action and the timing, I had to put a Schulz line on top. The program is fast, but it gave me a boring line. I had to go in and etch out the line. Inking a character was something I had to learn." – BARBARA ROBERTSON THE ELONGATED RAINDROP SHAPES CREATE THE ILLUSION OF MOTION BLUR AND MATCH THE ANIMATION STYLE.