Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/915636
n o v e m b e r . d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 7 c g w 9 "The flatter we can get these panels, the more realistic they can be," Grover says, noting that Fizt and the shaders both use flat UVs. For the dancers' big skirts, the team ad- opted an approach similar to the one they used for draperies in Brave. To construct the full skirts, they cut a circle into four pieces, separated them, and then in- serted another piece between. Ruffles were still difficult, however. "Some of the ruffles are just modeled; pasted, not simulated," Grover says. "But Imelda has simulated ruffles. The continuous collision system made that simulation better; however, we still have issues when we want to simulate the ruffle on the bottom of a dress. Our gathering system tends to scrunch up the dress it's attached to. We have some ideas how to fix that, but it's not solved yet." To make it possible and not cumber- some for the anima- tors to have the characters interact with the clothing, the simulation team worked with the tools team to develop a new gizmo called "simgrab." Simgrab constrains pieces of a garment in a specific location. Miguel has 58 different costume variants, PEPITA Pepita is great-great-grandmother Mamá Imelda's spirit guide in the Land of the Dead. A folk art alebrije brought to life, Pepita is a fierce, brightly colored wildcat with the tail of an iguana, the wings and rear feet of an eagle, and ram horns. "She has complicated shoulders," says Alonso Martinez, a character rigging artist. "Feathers, talons, and we can see every single tooth. It all had to communicate the same thing: This is a really strong character." Pepita is also a light source. "All the alebrije have patterns that glow," says Danielle Feinberg, director of photography for lighting. "We used a RenderMan mesh light to cast the light." THE COLOR OF BONE With 10,000 bones to paint, the team opted to develop soware to help the texture artists. "The challenge was to create bones that looked authentic without being creepy," says Byron Bashforth, character shading lead. For authenticity, the shading artists photographed a variety of bones to assemble a library of approximately 16 textures. "We plugged the photographed textures into our skeleton shader to layer the textures in bit by bit," Bashforth says. "We could control how and which textures landed on the bone, the color, the depth, and the response to light for every bone." Also, the shading artists had controls they could use to dial the bones from old to clean-cut. That, along with face paint on the skulls helped distinguish one character from another in crowds, and added richness and complexity to the scenes. The artists could also swap colors and details, emboss- ing, and glitter in the skeleton shader.