One of the first design challenges was creating a faithful transition from the 2D comic strip Garfield to the 3D film version. A huge challenge on the film was making the interaction between the CG Garfield and the real-life Odie look convincing.

The design process worked to zero in on the concept. The comic strip character was 2D, for the film he needed to be adapted into a 3D character. Some designs may have been truer to the comic, but didn’t work as well in the 3D world. The team refined those designs until they captured what everyone felt was the essence of the comic strip while fitting into the real world.

There is a lot of interaction with Garfield in the world of the film. “The CG character doesn’t just walk through it. When he sits down, he flops down. When he lays down, he’s splayed out all over the place so there’s a lot of tricks we did to deform the chair that he was sitting in. In the first shot of the movie he’s lying in his bed, underneath the covers, so we had to do a CG blanket over the top of Garfield as he pulls the covers over his head and wakes up and says his signature line, ‘I hate Mondays’. Then he has to pull the CG blanket off and climb out of his bed and jump up onto John’s bed... basically it’s this big, thick comforter, so the CG character has to walk on this and as he walks across he’s got to squish it down as he walks.” To achieve the effect, the team had the shot of the real comforter then built a model of the comforter. Garfield’s steps would deform the geometry of the model. By using the trick of projecting the background plate back onto to the geometry, as Garfield squished the comforter down, the texture of the background pushed down with it.

The team shot Garfield on set with the real animals and actors whenever possible. The team had all the survey equipment and measured the set. They used stuffed animals to walk through the shots and plan them out so that the actors and animal trainers would get a basic idea of what Garfield needed to do. The actors would get their eyelines and the camera operators would get the camera move and “the animals pretty much did what they did,” explains Deleeuw.

In the film, there is a lot of interaction between Garfield and the real dog, Odie. Odie constantly tries to get up into Garfield’s chair while he is in it, so the cat keeps pushing him off. In working with the animals, the team got the trainers blue gloves. They would push in the general area and direction that Garfield would push later on. In post, the blue gloves were removed and Garfield was composited in doing the requisite action.