Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/9706
n n n n CGI•Stereo normal. The character is a bit flat, the background is close. He’s in our per- sonal space a bit. As we ramp up, it isn’t like the shot goes farther away or comes closer, it just expands. The vol- ume within expands. It has the effect of the character getting closer and the background getting farther away. The audience feels the impact of the sequence, the music, lighting, and camera, but they don’t pick out what we’re doing in stereo. We think that’s the perfect use of stereo: adding emo- tional intensity without drawing atten- tion to the technique.” When Hiccup decides he can’t kill the dragon, the stereo drops down to be less deep than even in a normal sequence. The adrenaline drains from the scene. In another sequence, Hiccup, who is riding on the back of the dragon, does a free fall along the z axis. “They do a rolling dive, like going off a roller coaster,” Otto says, “and then they’re finally flying.” The animators working on that se- quence helped create the stereo 3D experience. “We want to make sure the 3D experience feels truthful and real,” Otto says. “It’s in the framing— the characters have to be within the frame—and in the timing. It’s how long you play certain moments out, how you allow certain depth cues to happen.” In the free fall, for example, the ani- mators hold back a moment as Hic- cup is finally flying, to give the audi- ence the same thrill Hiccup felt. But there are other ways in which stereo 3D has affected animation. “In 2D, everything is about silhouette,” Otto says. “Stereo gives you more read- ability; it reads very differently. We’re only scratching the surface.” McNally notes, for example, the action in animated films typically hap- pens on a proscenium stage with the characters on the left and right, and the action playing across the frame. “In 3D, though, we no longer have the confusion of characters overlapping,” he says. “3D can also carry more vi- sual density. In 2D, simplicity works better, and we spent a lot of time in the past clearing the space and sim- plifying the shots. But, the more the better in 3D. We can keep putting stuff into the shots and it never gets confusing.” –Barbara Robertson 18 April 2010 At top, Ruffnut and Tuffnut face a Deadly Nadder. Note how the lighting in this shot and the lack of background detail focuses attention on the characters. At bottom, the gruff Viking trainer Gobber, who lost his limbs fighting dragons, stands out from the teenagers behind him. Beard Taming Although many Vikings in the film have vari- ous types of beards, Hiccup’s father Stoick has the mother of all beards. “His beard is prob- ably as complex as Shrek in his entirety,” Otto points out. Stoick’s beard obscures his entire upper body and most of his face. “His face is the beard,” Loofbourrow laughs. “His beard is his lips. His cheeks. Even his brows are hairy eyebrows. You have to look at the hair to understand his per- formance, to see the smile in his beard. We had to make sure his expressions showed through.” Riggers Doug Stanat and Sean Nolan han- dled Stoick’s face and beard rigs, working to- gether to shape his facial expressions and make sure he had follow-through on his dynamic beard. As in most hair systems, guide curves controlled the overall shape of the characters’ hair and beards, with dynamics driven by the underlying performance creating the move- ment. Usually a character effects group runs the dynamics after the animators finish. Not this time. “In this case, because we knew the animators had to see the beard as they worked, we couldn’t send the beard to simulation and back,” Loofbourrow says. “It had to be part of the animation process. It wasn’t fast. But, it was fast enough.” So that the animators could see the guide curves, the modelers turned them into tubes. “Tat gave the animators a low-res preview of the volume of the hair,” says Ring. “We also tried to get as much movement built into the rig as we could so they could see the move- ment. We had the ability to mix hand-anima- tion controls with physically-based dynamics.” Stoick’s beard had 100 guide hairs draped over his chest and flowing along his face. Te animators could look at the tube geometry and, using a magnet, pull the curves in a spe- cific direction. “For really tricky cases, we’d take the guide curves back into Maya and use the whole suite of Maya tools—sometimes dy- namic calculations, sometimes hand-animated keyframes—to get the hair-to-hair contact working right,” Ring says. A surfacing department added shader pa- rameters that controlled the hairs’ shininess, kinkiness, color, and so forth, and the studio’s in-house renderer then multiplied the guide hairs into the thousands of beard hairs. Te process wasn’t always straightforward, though. “A whole bunch of departments are involved, and sometimes they worked in parallel,” Ring says. “So you get to the end, look at it, and the animators move a guide curve, rigging adjusts the rigging, surfacing changes a shader param- eter—iteration after iteration.” One reason for the iterations was that the crew created the film in stereo 3D. “Tis was one of the first films in which we looked at the hair and fur in stereo 3D,” Loofbourrow says. “All kinds of stuff can happen in a bushy beard that you don’t see until you put on 3D glass- es.” Te problems typically happened with the guide hairs, with two guide hairs passing through each other—a problem exaggerated when the renderer interpolated the guide hairs into thousands. “We previewed the beard in 3D as much as possible,” Loofbourrow says. “We’d slap on the