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 7 family's music ban, and other ancestors. All the people in the Land of the Dead – except Miguel – are skeletons. Skele- tons wearing clothes. "When you take the flesh off a character, you lose everything you use as a character designer," says Daniel Arriaga, character art designer. "We tried a lot of things to create variations of shape, and came up with the idea of having them wear clothes." A second design challenge was in creating facial expressions on a skull. We gave them a lower jaw that detach- es, gave them eyes, and some have teeth," Arriaga says. They also drew eyebrows and added yarn hair. They broke Pixar's rule about staying true to materials. "We committed to having eyelids and eyeballs, and a shaped socket for expressions," says Gini Santos, supervis- ing animator. "We moved away from the jawbone structure and gave the skeletons lips for clear mouth shapes in dialog. But, they still suggest rigidity. We kept the line of the skull." All told, 80 primary skeleton characters, each with 127 bones, populate the Land of the Dead. Animators experimented to find the rules for these characters, to deter- mine how stylized to make the motion, to determine what holds the bones together and how far they can stretch that. "We could push the spine against the rib cage like an invisible rubber band," Santos says. "We needed to determine how far we could go until it was unbelievable." They started with walk cycles, pick- ing the character Hector. Hector is a charming trickster who desperately wants to cross the marigold bridge but can't because no one has put his photo on an ofrenda. Hector promises to help Miguel find Ernesto de la Cruz in return for Miguel's promise to take Hector's photo back to his family's ofrenda. "Hector's walk is inspired by Ratso in the film Midnight Cowboy," Santos says. "It is a symbol of his brokenness. The looseness of his bones, the movement in his ribs added richness to his walk." That "looseness" can extend for all the skeletons into an ability to drop their eye- balls into their jaws and to separate sections of their skeleton, even individual bones, and then join them again. Character TDs in the rigging department made it possible. DEM BONES "The animators kept requesting little bones, but I resisted that," says Christian Hoffman, characters supervisor. "I didn't want the shaders to have to deal with more bones. So, we created additional controls constrained to a space different from what the character was doing." The rigging artists put that information on a separate layer so when a shot called for animators to blow a character apart, the animators could bring in additional rigging decoupled from the animation on the rest of the character. "A constraint rig would track the lo- cation of a piece of geometry," Hoffman says. "It knows the world-space position and orientation of the geometry and can apply an additional matrix on the stack. That way we can have it ignore what the character is doing by swapping it out with a different space." Animators had specific controls to move the bones around with extra loose- ness. With a "spread and roll" function, for example, animators could separate the rib cage from the hips yet still have control all the way up and down the spine. "The trick, which is why we needed an additional rig to 'explode' the rig, is that the controls on the isolated parts follow the main movement," Hoffman says. For dialog, the riggers added angles to the jaw to give the animators more control over articulation, and automated the way some parts of the jaw move. DANTE Dante, a Mexican Xoloitzcuintil dog and Miguel's loyal companion, follows the boy into the Land of the Dead. Like all Xolo dogs, Dante is nearly hairless, with only little tufts of hair on his body. "There's nowhere to hide his wrinkles," says Christian Hoffman, characters supervisor. Xolo is a street dog with no fat, so rather than volume simulations typically used for large, jiggly masses, the character team gave him secondary animation through skin simulations. As he moves, wrinkles form, particularly on his neck. "He's a very unaware character," says Nick Rosario, directing animator. "He's a puppy in a dog's body. At first we treated him with too much of a thought process. We had to limit that. He's our most cartoony character, so we used more deformations, squashes, and stretches than for the other characters." One of Dante's most cartoony characteristics is his tongue, which droops from the side of his mouth and flaps as he runs. "His tongue is almost always exposed," Hoffman says. "Rigging it was a big challenge for us, but fortunately we had a good analogy: Hank from Finding Dory."