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STORKS www.postmagazine.com 34 POST OCTOBER 2016 WOLF PACK Obviously, the film plays to the popu- lar mythologizing of storks, but when animators put the wolves under the same lens and pushed their mythol- ogizing to its limit, the results almost stole the show. These are wolves that not only want to raise children, but mother them to death. And these are wolves that not only move in packs, but in sophisticated formations. From the outset, executives wanted their shape-shifting superpowers to be a tour de force of animation that would be the envy of the industry. Indeed, the formations would require hun- dreds of wolves to be almost inextri- cably entangled, while Alpha, Beta, and any number of others would be striking absurd expressions. "Right out of the gate, we were thinking this was something VFX would handle," says Beveridge, "so we tried all kinds of things, like squishing wolves into a volume, all of which quickly proved that we needed to hand-animate this. There would be no [procedural] shortcuts. What's more, each giant wolf formation would take approximately one month to com- plete, so we had to do it right the first time; it had to be carefully art directed and designed," says Beveridge. To that end, lead animator Alan Camilo sketched rough, "moving storyboard" passes in pen & ink, es- tablishing in broad strokes the major shapes and timing for each sequence, then helped develop a system that would allow the wolf pack to function together like a herd of synchronized Cirque du Soleil acrobats. "It required a huge change in workflow," says Beveridge. "Instead of having hundreds of rigs in a su- per-heavy scene, or parsing out all the wolves into separate animation files, we built a system where could have hundreds of characters in a scene, but work with only one rig that could be shared among the characters. So, as long as all of the characters are of the same type, we could sneakily swap the rig from one to the other." Of course, each character could have its own unique rig, paired to its full, higher-resolution mesh, which animators could switch to in about four seconds for unique performance changes before then switching back to the faster, universal rig. "In addition, it allowed animators to make hundreds of duplicates of a single performance," Beveridge adds. "Each clone could have its own global position animation and time offset. Therefore, changes to the source would propagate to the clones, allowing changes to have a massive scaled effect." This one rig would employ an elaborate set of constraints, driven keys, and relationships in Maya, so as animators tweaked the animation of one wolf, the adjacent wolves would react accordingly. PONYTAILS & FUR Bobbing and swaying to the rhythm of her fiery enthusiasm, Tulip's red ponytail, which is almost bigger than her head, was a team effort between animation and VFX. Using an IK joint chain in Maya rigged to a giant, spherical volume for the hair, animators hand-keyed most of the motion, including secondary move- ment and overlap. Effects artists would generate hair using Sony's proprietary instancing software Kami, employing Maya's nHair solver for dynamic secondary movement and overlap, as well as Houdini for another layer of simulation for various sprigs and strands of hair. "We needed the animator to hand-key the important pieces of the bounce and jiggle, making sure [our dynamics] were either exaggerating it nicely or not distracting from the performance," says Smith. For the wolves, the directors were at first hoping to avoid fur simulation in favor of a more cartoonish out- line, but when early tests ended up resembling plastic volumes, lacking the tangibility and the "grounded in reality" artistic mandate, artists again used Kami to generate and comb the matted and sometimes bedraggled coats for hundreds of wolves. "Kami involves the traditional laying out of guide hairs, which the comput- er then interpolates to fill in the rest of the surface," says Smith. "Though we wanted the hair to look realistic, we tried for a more graphic look in the design of the combs." However, they styled the human hair with Kami, as well as Maya's Xgen instancing plug-in, ultimately fun- neling the animation through Maya's nHair for dynamics. STORKS WITHOUT FEATHERS The only surface for which instancing geometry and extensive dynamics would be too harshly realistic for their Looney Tunes performances would be the feathers of the storks. Junior's arm is a wing, then a hand, with or without a thumb, or a bran- dishing index finger. "We had to engineer this incred- ibly-robust system where, anatom- ically, Junior's wing would function like a wing, with a tendon attached to the wrist and the shoulder, and fold into this beautiful streamlined shape tucked close to the body. Then Maya's nCloth solver and Marvelous Designer were used for Tulip's clothes and Junior's sling.