In Stage 2, the color key is established and the look of the character is defined further.

Maya is an essential part of the pipeline (which also includes Houdini and Realflow for vfx and RenderMan), but they wrote codes to enhance character performance and added a new intuitive tool called Shelf Control that provides an outline of characters that can be viewed on screen and provides a direct link to the controls for specific autonomy.

“We had bottlenecks in the past with character set up, “ Goldberg continues, “where a lot of the problems stemmed from modelers needing to anticipate what face shapes an animator would need, and the animator would work back and forth with them and come up with a library of face shapes. We had found that test shots would look great and the production shot needs would go beyond what we tested for and we wound up with a big bottleneck needing more face shapes from the modelers.

“One of the main goals was to avoid that, so the first thing I did was to recognize the bottleneck. We took Eamonn Butler, our animation supervisor, and one of our premiere software engineers, Xinmin Zhao, and they came up with a suite of high level sculpting tools called Chicken Wire… [to bring more elasticity to the facial performance and help animators approximate the range they would normally have with traditional animation.”

Thus, Chicken Wire gave characters a very Disney feel with the use of deformers. “For example, from the corner of a nose down to the corner of a mouth is defined as a descriptive line, “ Goldberg adds. “If we were to take that descriptive line, which actually appears as a crease on a face, and combine that with other descriptive lines and place them on top of objects, this would allow animators to pick areas on those descriptive lines and move the face in a very intuitive way. So that they didn’t have to anticipate every little nuance that they would need and have a modeler build it. If you think of it as rigging a face, the animator can go on the fly and create shapes and facial poses that they need.”

Stage 3 is modeling where the character is modeled, rigged and skinned on the computer. In Stage 4 feather patterns and texture are added to the character. Stage 5: Feathers are softened and shaped to resemble a real chicken.

Jason Ryan (Fantasia/2000 and Dinosaur), who supervised Chicken Little, adds, “What we’ve done is taken all of the great tools and techniques like squatch-and-stretch and smear frames — all that stuff that makes motion fluid — and brought them into the CG world. So it feels like we have the best of both worlds. Stuff we could never do in 2D like real detailed lighting and fabric and coloring and really making these characters dimensional. Now we’re dealing with an actual 3D form, so it’s very challenging to bring that to life. The suspension of disbelief is a lot harder in 3D because it feels like it’s real.

“The movement has to be spot on or the audience will sense that something is wrong. I was able to concentrate on the performance. There are no more assistants, breakdown artists, in-betweeners and cleanup artists. Now you’re putting all the bells and whistles on yourself. Rigging, modeling, look painters, texture painters, lighting & compositors. They provide new dimensional feel.”

For director Mark Dindall (The Emperor’s New Groove), his frame of reference was the Goofy shorts, “I showed a lot of Goofy cartoons and talked about that caricatured style of animation that I really like. That’s not something that you immediately think of doing as a CG-animated film. But that’s what I wanted to do. How do we figure this out? It’s really hard. If you stretch an arm too much, you don’t want the fur to separate and see the skin beneath. Some of our 2D animators didn’t know any better not to break the model to make something work, and people started to notice that there were ways of stretching the model so you only showed where it worked. So they came up with things like the stork pitcher. He winds up with this corkscrew pitch that was so amazing and unlike anything that CG animation had done up to date.”