In the final stage, Chicken Little’s final look is composed. The character is now ready to be posed to match the story points.

Ryan continues about the challenges of animating a character without pupils. “I wasn’t able to do a thinking character [in which he could use his eyes], so I had to move his head, which gave him a nervous energy. Also, I’ve been able to move his eyebrows from the top of his head to really tight squints to get that flexibility that’s important. Squash-and-stretch is really important because it took away that puppet feel from computer-generated images. What we want to do is give the character a fleshy feel.”

Textures were a big challenge too for Look Development. The software development team wrote a system for placement of hair, cloth, feathers and leaves called XGen. This allowed shortcuts by using cards and then painting on top of that with a new program called Paint 3D, which is especially good for transparency and displacement. They actually scanned feathers and since they don’t light easily, they kept the feathers off until final rendering.

Lighting & Compositing used the Lumiere lighting program and created compositing software they termed DShake. Another Disney tradition is being able to hone in on the most important aspect of a shot and read silhouettes of characters. They were able to achieve this, especially when Buck and Chicken Little fight off the aliens, with an Occlusion (or global illumination) pass that couldn’t be achieved in 2D. This provides subtle shading — form and depth — and volumetric rendering. Occlusion improvements on subsequent films will be able to influence color too.

Jason Ryan who supervised Chicken Little, will be working on Rapunzel Unbraided (above) next. He thinks digital artists are just scratching the surface in creating more dimensional animation in a CG world.

“It just seems like we’re scratching the surface,” Ryan adds. “I’m going to be working on Rapunzel Unbraided next, doing a haggard old witch. Her skin looks like an apple that’s been left out in the sun for years. What you want to try and get is that skin over bone. This is just incredible stuff — it truly feels like there’s been a [technological] evolution through animation. We went from flat cartoons to getting the multi-plane effect and now with CG getting full dimension and these really believable characters. We’re able to control the silhouette of the characters, so we’re getting very designed so you can shape shift these forms so they have all the aspects of two-dimensional animation into this great CG world.”

Meanwhile, data management and data versioning were accomplished through a new program called SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruel Pita Artists). “Every shot in a department was imported or exported through an SPCA interface,” Goldberg suggests. “It was modeled on the traditional pipeline. Setting up the overall pipeline and data flow from the departments involved an interesting philosophical issue. We basically had a system of making 2D movies that was a refined thing of beauty. We had spirited discussions about chucking this approach. We decided that it was too efficient to throw it out. Our execs, directors, producers and art directors still come from 2D and still have a particular way of looking at things and have an approval process that’s worth keeping.

The upcoming American Dog (above) will tackle very large environments, something Chicken Little wasn’t able to take on.

“Scene Planning is gone because we didn’t want a catch-all department. We wanted to keep each department responsible for their own deliverables. We put a lot of scripts in place for artists to check their work and automated as much as we could. One of the overriding philosophies of the old pipeline was: ‘Don’t Pass Crap Downstream.’ We kept placing rigorous checks for what the next department was going to do in the current department. There was resistance at first because department heads got frustrated. Ultimately, as enough of these checks got into place, we started seeing really big wins because things didn’t come back and it did eliminate those catchall departments.

“We went ahead and took on some big initiatives like subdivision surfaces into our pipeline, but didn’t refine it on Chicken Little, so other shows are going through big levels of refinement. One of the things we didn’t tackle that American Dog is taking on in earnest is the ability to handle very large environments. We came up with a nice element flow for being able to bring elements from one department to the next and have layout set everything up, but we didn’t get there on Chicken Little. This will be essential to Rapunzel too.”