Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/77744
n n n n CG Animation to be really, really rich," Kratter says. Merida would race through the world surrounding her family castle, on Angus, her Clydesdale. She would run through it on foot, following little electric-blue will-o-wisps. It was a landscape beyond anything attempted before at Pixar. "Th e thing about the landscape is what it Setting the Stage During late summer of 2006 and again in October 2007, 12 members of the Brave production team—including directors Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman, producer Katherine Sarafi an, story lead Luis Gonza- les, production designer Steve Pilcher, and shading art director Tia Kratter—traveled to Scotland to meet people, immerse themselves in the landscape, and scout locations. In the Scottish Highlands, the team felt the wind in their faces and pushed their hands down into the spongy moss that softened the rocks and draped the earth. Th ey saw lichen dripping from trees shrouded in mist. Th ey stretched out like snow angels in fi elds of heather. "We knew the world of Brave was going gives you in spirit," Pilcher says. "To do some- thing without that power and magnifi cence would be a disservice. We built the ring of monolithic stones. Th e castle and the black houses covered with thatch. Th e beautiful sky with sunlight moving through mist. Th e forest, the highlands, the lochs. We had a full range of emotions to work with visually." Although the castle and cottage were dense sets and artistic challenges, the technical chal- lenges had their roots in the vegetation. "We prepared lots of set dressing, rocks, and trees, and put them into a curving landscape," says Pilcher. "But, the moss didn't look right." Nor did the lichen, bracken (ferns), or grass. Mod- elers formed the terrain, rocks, and tree trunks by hand, and set dressers placed the elements into scenes. But, these landscape elements had no texture. Painting with Code "If you just render the geometry, it's pretty, but it doesn't look lush and furry," says supervis- ing technical director Bill Wise. "We wanted Spanish moss hanging from tree limbs, and clumps and hummocks of moss. Th e High- lands of Scotland were like another character in the fi lm, a living backdrop for what was go- ing on. We had never tackled as vast an out- door landscape, but we were able to generate it using insane procedural geometry developed by Inigo Quilez. He's a magician." Quilez describes the method he used to generate the 15 types of foliage, rocks, and even small fl ies as "painting with code." Th e 12 June/July 2012 code exists as a Pixar RenderMan plug-in written in C++; that is, a DSO. When Quilez started, he rendered with PRMan 15, then, as time passed, changed to Version 16. "It was quite fun using a compiler to pro- duce assets," Quilez says. "Going from the fl at world into a super-dense 3D world was all my work. Moss with small clover leaves around it, bracken, hummocks, hanging moss, all the leaves and pine needles, lichen, grass and fl owers, heather, birch trees, gorse, Scotch broom, the distant trees and rocks, the small dots that were fl ies, all were specifi c pieces of code; all the shapes, the colors, everything is in the code. We didn't write a tool that an art- ist would use; there's no user interface. Usu- ally we use code to glue things together. In this case, we thought of code as assets." At fi rst, Quilez planned to hard-code only moss and grass, but the result was so suc- cessful he ended up writing specifi c code for many more types of vegetation. "I abstracted the code and found the parts they all had in common, but in principle, each is diff erent," he says. "Th ey share the logic, of course." He treated the vegetation that grew on the rocks, trees, and up from the ground diff erently Elinor from that without supporting geometry. For the former: "We' polygon by polygon in the mesh," Quilez ex- plains. "For every quad, we would generate ran- dom points, and from those points we would grow fl owers, leaves, and something else." For the latter: "When we didn't have a mesh," Quilez explains, "we'd place cubes d start with 3D models and go She holds the kingdom together. Her long, brown hair exemplifi es her per- sonality: braided and held in place. When unwrapped, her hair is 6 feet 6 inches long. To simulate the move- ment, the crew developed a one-off technique using a volumetric cage. Elinor's green gown is fl ow- ing and feminine with jewel-like, geometric shapes. She carries the weight of the kingdom with dignity and gravity. Her line starts low with her skirt drawn behind her, and rises up vertically.