"Gnomeo is definitely one of these projects that if it had come through another studio at a different time with different people attached to it, could've been a live-action movie with CG characters," offers Anderson. "Everything in the gardens is absolutely realistic, so the modeling and surfacing teams did such detailed work. The characters are heavily textured, so we had to be mindful of the fact that if you stretch a shoulder or an elbow or a chest too much, all the chips and cracks and paint defects would stretch or bend in an unnatural way and destroy the feeling that they were made of ceramic.

"I'd say that we tried to keep in mind that certain characters would be limited in their movements, but at the same time we never let anything get in the way of a strong pose or a strong attitude or a strong facial expression. Now Featherstone, the plastic pink flamingo, was definitely a challenge because of how he's built: he has a seam right down the middle of his neck, so we tried to get the best pose and make sure the seam was not twisting too much. But because Featherstone and the frog, Nanette, were not made of ceramic, we could stretch them more in an exaggerated way."

Michael Chaffe, one of Starz's supervising animators, adds, "Sometimes you can get funny stuff with limitations. You'd have to find ways of bending from the waist and act something out. You couldn't get a strong pose so that's where the facial gestures come in: "The Bennie and the Jets" sequence where Benny orders the lawnmower [on steroids] is a prime example."

According to Chaleur, "We had to figure out a way to relax the geometry so we could keep the detail. It was like a kind of post process after the animation was done. If the animation created some distortion, then we could take care of that by having this post process. Another challenge for the characters is that they were supposed to be a single object, but then we have those eyes, which are texture projected. They are not real geometry.

"The toolset [Maya, Fusion, RenderMan and mental ray run on HP Z workstations and DreamColor monitors] evolved a lot for the project to provide flexibility and put a lot of information for lighting. Specifically, R&D worked on all the grooming for the foliage and all the controls for the grass and fur for the bulldog. For the dog and other characters, we ended up creating sub-clumping information. What we've done as well is create a splatter shader to cover the ground with 10 different textures that are small in size but have high-resolution. It distributes all the textures and melds them together without any seams through different alphas.

"Because of so much foliage, we optimized our work through mental ray and we traced everything. So we split our ceramic in different ways. We had the highlight, the retracing/reflection and the environment reflections. They were split so animation and lighting could create an environment reflection map that matched the actual light of the set. And that map would be automatically rigged by our shader."