Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/691968
10 cgw m ay . j u n e 2 0 1 6 the pigs to have very smooth forms, very clean shapes – and also that the pigs would have to have a very wide acting range. However, the simpler a character is, the more the audience is apt to notice every imperfection and every change in that shape," he says. "So our characters had to transition these simple, clean shapes into crazy animation." This meant that the rigs had to be especially complex – un- derneath, they have a very com- plicated, sophisticated model that required a lot of technology, says Dimian. "Oentimes the rigs focus on the range of motion and what the character can do. On the pigs, because of the volumes and deformation, each needed to have very intricate, smooth controls so all the imperfections are smoothed out. The pigs stay so, plump, and on model as they went through some very extreme poses." Volume controls were incorporated into the rig with predefined ways to create the skin folds and wrinkles, rather than have them result from the performance only. Because of this, there is a puffy little volume, as opposed to flat little wrinkles, when the pigs move. There are thousands of pigs, and they move in unison, like a hive, working for the same pur- pose. So, the question became whether to make them the same or different in appearance. The answer: to make them unique. "When you look at them as a mass of characters, they should move as one unit, but when you get close, each one has a very distinctive personality and a very specific role," says Nash. In terms of their appearance, the pigs are primarily material- based, with a subtle hair layer so they don't look plastic-like. "They look especially good in some of the night shots where you have lighting that is rimming them and this nice fuzzy little hair layer that adds a lot of detail," Dimian points out. T A L E O F T W O I S L A N D S The movie has two very different civilizations. Most of the movie takes place on Bird Island, a lush, organic, visually rich environment that is stylized with a touch of realism. There is no electricity or machines. In contrast is Pig Island, an over- built, polluted, industrial-type world. Between the two islands, there are more than 90 loca- tions that appear in the film. According to Pete Oswald, production designer, due to the more basic design of the char- acters, the filmmakers took the opportunity to make the worlds more realistic and complicated. "We wanted to design a film that was familiar yet unexpected," he says. "So, the shapes in the film are very bold and exagger- ated, and some are cartoony." Nevertheless, they are textured with real-life materials. For ex- ample, the bark of the trees have a bird-feather motif, harkening back to the fact that the birds are flightless and have never been off the island. The artists used a terrain sys- tem called GIT when generating the foliage on Bird Island. Dimian likens it to a grooming system, whereby the artists are "groom- ing" the terrain, only with objects instead of hair. "It's procedural and works like a paint system. You can paint over an area, and that populates it based on a predetermined ratio of grass and flowers," explains Dimian. The artists also built an extensive library of plants, trees, and shrubs, all in a bird-inspired motif, that allowed them to mix-and-match, scale, and create a rich world. All told, there are more than 100 individual, organic compo- nents in the Bird Island library. There are 24 types of trees, a mixture of imaginative and real- istic. In addition, the artists used a library of 40 to 50 plants, rocks, and other items. "We had to build more unique environments here because we didn't want the island to look manufactured," says Dimian. "However, making it look organic while doing it proce- durally is difficult." A similar organic con- struction set library with roof types and side structures was used to build all the bird huts around the village. In contrast is Pig Island, where there's no rhyme or reason to how things are constructed. Buildings – more than 1,000 – are placed haphazardly and stacked vertically atop one another. "Pig Island is kind of a Rube Goldberg type of world," says Dimian. "It is very complicat- ed-looking and heavily instanced. But, it's built to fall apart." ARTISTS BUILT PIG ISLAND WITH A CONSTRUCTION SET OF PIECES WITH VOLUME, SO IT COULD BE DESTROYED EASILY.