Keyframe animation on top of the performance capture is still key in creating hybrid features. Imageworks animators keyframed mouth, tongue, cheeks and brows to attain greater subtlety and later added cloth, hair, lighting and vfx. 

For greater detail, the solving was adjusted to merge two capture systems utilized on Polar Express and Monster House. On the former, the markers on the actor’s face moved the skin directly and on the latter they were interpreted to trigger certain shapes and poses on the face. For example, you can keep Anthony Hopkins’ facial movement to some degree but can change him into his character much more controllably. This added to the sense of realism and resulted in crucial ease of use for animators. They have the ability to both turn on a particular pose or shape or can go down to the muscle level and play with jiggle. So they have two sets of tools to play with in one superset.

Keyframe animation on top of the performance capture is still key in these hybrid features, as they are not yet able to animate in a single pass. Imageworks animators keyframed mouth, tongue, cheeks and brows to attain greater subtlety and later added cloth, hair, lighting and vfx. On Beowulf, they developed 125 controls to mimic facial expressions and an even greater number of muscle controls. They also pushed the expressions further by adjusting the rig and readily admit that female characters are a lot less forgiving than males, so they required additional shading and lighting tweaks. And they even made tools to go back to animation and fix performances after lighting (with lots of eyeline changes).

The eyes, of course, were most crucial. According to Animation Supervisor Kenn McDonald, it begins with the EOG system (four electrodes around the eye sockets), which runs the information to drive the animation in the actor’s face. In discussing eye movement and physiology with specialists, the animation team discovered that the hardest part in crossing The Uncanny Valley is the involuntary eye movements -- and that’s what they set out to accomplish through improved EOG, shading and CGI.

Then there were the environments, which had to have the same level of detail as the characters so they wouldn’t stand out. “There was always a wealth of photographic detail that we could get,” Chen offers. “We always want to incorporate some level of reality in the textures. We would find photos of stone and castle walls and incorporate that into environments.”

As the story progresses throughout 40 years, most of the action occurs inside Heorot Castle (new and old versions) and later across 100 square miles of coastal Denmark during a battle with a mutant dragon.

For the dragon attack, Imageworks was very detailed on ground and in air and were picky on where to show trees and shrubs. Matte paintings were used for larger environments. 

“Part of the challenge is designing dynamic sets and creating believable textures,” Chen adds. “We made a stylistic choice in having Mead Hall inside the castle expand. The ceiling becomes three times its normal height when Grendel arrives for his horrific attack. The lens is wide at the same time: a combination of a wide-angle lens and taking advantage of the visual medium and growing the set.

“For the dragon attack, we were very detailed on ground and in air. We were clever about picking and choosing where to show trees and shrubs. We used matte paintings [working in Cinema 4D and Photoshop] for larger environments. It’s an identical philosophy to making a live-action movie. At this point, the line is blurred between live action and animation. I used everything I would have for live action. The difference is that I’m now creating the main characters as an illusion too, which is an outgrowth of what we did on Stuart Little, only now with humans.”

This was the largest vfx crew assembled at Imageworks, with a team of nearly 450. Chen says it exceeds even the Spider-Man franchise in terms of the wide range of effects. “Usually we do fire or water continuously. Here we had to do all of it, including scenes where Beowulf fights sea monsters during a storm at sea. We did full water simulation and additional particle work for interaction and characters in the water: the rain, the storm and mist blowing off.

“We basically re-wrote our front end of the pipeline for Beowulf to be more efficient in data management. It got to the point on previous movies where it could take 45 minutes just to open a Maya file. And saving used to take 15 minutes. We designed the system so it would load very quickly and save time literally from minutes to seconds. When we broke apart the scope of the movie on a technical level, we had about 100 shots with more than 20 people, sometimes up to 100. We needed to have a system allowing you to selectively edit one or two people and not have to re-render everything when reviewing the animation. We came up with a method where you could cache different levels of your render and then do a Z-based composite and layer everything together. It sounds so elementary but requires an enormous amount of data management tools that were created in-house. We spent four to five months writing this infrastructure. Data wise, we even broke the efficiency that we created for animated films. This was a lot more complex.”