Fur continues to be a difficult challenge for animators creating realistic CG characters.
Karl Herbst (left) and Arnon Manor, digital effects supervisors.

The team had to be constantly aware of Garfield’s fur. Although Rhythm & Hues has extensive experience with hair — they have developed their own software — there is always room to improve those tools. Dealing with a character with shorter hair is different from working with a longhaired cat such as Garfield. You can get away with a lot more. With long hair, anytime Garfield ran into something or whenever wind was blowing on him, turned out to be a big task, which probably needed a second generation of tools.

A production this complex requires a large support staff. The crew at its largest consisted of around 320 people. Besides creating the Garfield character, R & H also supplied other visual effects for the film. These included matte painting work and some simple composites. All in all, the visual effects supplied by the team made up approximately 53 minutes of screen-time out of a 74-minute film — a large amount of work.

Karl Herbst and Arnon Manor were the digital effects supervisors. They took the entire pipeline for Garfield and split it in two halves. Manor was the front half of the pipeline. He was in charge of tracking, rigging and match-moves of anybody that was carrying Garfield or anytime Garfield was pushing against Odie. He made sure all the animation was going smoothly, up to technical animation. That group dealt with making sure the deforms pushed against Garfield correctly and worked on hair dynamics and belly jiggle. Garfield has a big fat belly that hangs down, so there was a group whose job was to go in and as Garfield’s belly rubbed against something, they made sure it actually deformed. Deleeuw elaborates, “They kept describing it as a big water balloon. Imagine your cat’s got a water balloon tied to its stomach. Or think of Santa Claus with a bowl full of jelly. The belly would bounce around.”

Herbst took over, though, lighting and compositing, making sure everything went smoothly there. On set, a range of images were shot with HDRI - high dynamic range imagery. Two cameras with fisheye lenses were programmed to go through multiple exposures so they captured the darkest darks to the brightest brights. That information helped in the lighting later on. The lighters still lit with CG lights and typical CG tools, but another layer was put in with all the bounce light from the lights on the set using images from the HDRI cameras.

The movie ended up being made several times. The team worked on set doing what they planned. They would then go back and develop animatics of the scene. Once the animatics were done, editorial put together a rough-cut of the movie. This was then shown to Bill Murray, who was voicing Garfield. He would record the dialogue and come up with ideas. So the animatics would be changed in editorial. When the work was finally passed along to the animators, they’d get ideas and change the performance a little bit there too. “It was definitely a collaborative process between a bunch of different people,” according to Deleeuw.