After seven years in the making, Blue Sky Studios unveils Robots, a dazzling world complete with metallic and mechanical form and function. All images ™ and © 2005 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved.

One look at Chris Wedge’s dazzling Robots (opening today, March 11, 2005, from Twentieth Century Fox), and you instantly see what Blue Sky Studios is capable of with 3D animation. Its frenetic and colorful robotic world is a giant leap from the more primitive Ice Age; its metallic and mechanical form and function perfectly meld into a fresh and familiar world all its own. Sprung from the retro minds of Wedge and William Joyce (the creator of Rolie Polie Olie and other illustrated children’s books), Robots clearly is a seven-year labor of love about following your dreams.

Thankfully, the huge success of Ice Age convinced Fox Animation president Chris Meledandri to finance their slightly more expensive pet project ($75 million, up from $60 million) and trust the wisdom of their vision — a cross between The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Wizard of Oz. The result is CG eye candy full of warmth and whimsy. Wedge and technical guru Carl Ludwig have been preaching the CG gospel right along with John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, and Blue Sky pushes the craft of 3D animation with its own distinctly wholesome touch.

Robots sprung from the retro minds of Blue Sky Studios’ co-founder Chris Wedge (left) and children’s book author William Joyce, who also served as the producer and production designer for the project. Joyce photo credit: Philip Gould

After trips to the Brooklyn Museum of Art and various junkyards, car shows and airports, Wedge and Joyce (serving as first-time production designer) explored a timeless, mechanical look that encompassed the history of our industrial society — steam engines and coffee pots, vintage automobiles and dishwashers and every type of utensil and gizmo you can imagine. Wedge says Robots is a metaphor for our technologically obsessed culture, in which we discard the values and humanity of the past. The trick was not only getting the story right about winsome inventor Rodney Copperbottom (Ewan McGregor) going to Robot City in search of his own Oz and saving all the outmoded Bots from destruction, but also establishing a complex yet believable world, which required a fair amount of advancements at Blue Sky.

Fortunately, Blue Sky staffed up from 180 to 240 and ramped up its desktop and rendering capabilities to meet the challenges of creating such a dynamic and detailed metallic world made from Maya. The White Plains, New York-based studio purchased HP Render Racks with twice the speed and three-and-a-half times the memory as was required on Ice Age. It also acquired desktops with Linux-based HPs that are four times faster than the previous Unix-based systems. Meanwhile, its proprietary ray-tracing renderer, CGI Studio, which creates lighting as it appears in the real world, was tailor made for Robots, allowing Blue Sky artists to literally place lights as if working on a live-action set.

“The technology that you see on screen that we developed for Robots has to do with the way we textured the world, and the way we created crowds, “Wedge explains. “The Materials guys came up with ways to create procedurally distressed surfaces — degrees of wear and tear on metal. It mostly had to do with how objects age, so you could show the chips the closer you got to the surface curve.”