Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/77744
n n n n VFX•CG Films his hair curled. They loved his worn spots." Tippett Studio and Iloura artists then worked on making the test bear production-ready. "I think at this point Tippett had more time, so they ended up with the production-ready bear a little sooner," Clark says. "They worked on some subtle things, like the bottoms of his feet, which, because Ted sits on a couch in a lot of the movie, would be visible. They got him ready for animation, making sure he had the right mouth shapes and animation rigs." Both studios were creat- ing Ted, so he had to look the same, not just aesthetically with the fur, but also the lexi- con of his character, as well. Exactly the same, in fact. Because the sequences cut from one to the other, the bears created at each studio had to match perfectly. "Tip- pett and Iloura (Above) In this final shot, Ted might look innocent, but he's a profanity-spewing, horny bear. (Smaller images, top to bottom) The live-action plate. A simple bear for animators to move. Ted is costume-ready for cloth simulation. 56 June/July 2012 between the two studios. Both places com- municated freely." Tippett and Iloura artists animate in Auto- desk's Maya and use The Foundry's Nuke for compositing, which helped. But, Tippett uses Pixar' s RenderMan and Iloura uses DNA Re- search's 3Delight and Chaos Group's V-Ray, and they both have proprietary fur systems. "The look of the fur and the grooming probably took the most back and forth," says Clark. "But, they kept the lines open. It was a dream." The studios did side-by-side renders using motion-captured data from the test and the same background plate, and the two bears matched. "We showed the bears to production and got their approval," Clark says. "And, we were off. We agreed we could adjust any subtle nuances in shot production." One nuance that the VFX artists added in shot production was a cloth simulation. "The cloth simulation added weight to Ted and turned him into a fabric bag with stuffing in it," Clark says. "It was really interesting to see the difference. Without the cloth sim, he looks great. With it, he has that realistic sag in places." bear close to half and half in terms of the number of shots," Clark says, "and I can't think of any point through the whole production that there was any hint of competition shared the Bear-ly There Usually, visual effects artists need to match animatronics or maquettes created by a special effects artist. In a twist to the way in which that process usually happens, Mark Rappaport from Creature Effects created a stuffy from the CG character. "We had this pre-approved, fully-realized CG character," Clark says, "so