Virtual environments include Robot City (left) and the hi-tech sleekness of Big Weld Industries.

Thus, because of the tremendous size of the virtual environments — Robot City (combustion), Big Weld Industries (high-tech) and the subterranean Chop Shop (steam) — Blue Sky developed an interactive way of applying multi-surface layering instead of texture mapping. This procedural mapping, in which the computer automatically applies, say, the amount of chipping and how far the artist wants it to go, is quicker, more productive and stable and less expensive. For individual characters and crowds, Blue Sky developed a Bot Creator (a web-browsable interface that allowed the design team to create robots from interchangeable parts and then repurpose them for crowd scenes that did not require lots of detail), along with Frankenbots (which allowed the computer to randomly pick and create generic-looking robots).

“We actually had to pull back on the amount of background detail,” recalls Joyce, who is collaborating with Wedge on a new feature and is trying to set up his own animation studio in Shreveport, Louisiana. “There was so much fun stuff that we could tell it was hard for the audience to stay on point. We gave them too much eye candy and had to start using more close-ups. “Unlike the upcoming Disney feature adapted from his book, A Day with Wilbur Robinson, Joyce concedes that Robots is a world they made together at Blue Sky. “The interesting thing about Chris is that when we started, he told me that there would be many times when [the Fox] executives would say that this couldn’t be done. But if you wait long enough, [the Blue Sky team] will figure out a way. And they did.”

A perfect case in point is the Dominoes sequence in which famed industrialist Big Weld (Mel Brooks) joyously rides a cascading wave of two million dominoes in his palatial home. Indeed, it is Wedge’s proudest moment. “That for me is the kind of audacity that movies are all about. It kind of sneaks up on you. For me, it’s like an acid flashback. I wanted it to be a big, strange, psychedelic sequence. There are a number of reasons why it’s in the movie. You’ve been waiting an hour to find out what happened to Big Weld. I just wanted to figure out what he’s been doing. We struggled and struggled and struggled with that. Did Ratchet [Greg Kinnear] put him under guard in a dungeon and they had to break him out? But that seemed too easy. At one point, he was just hitting golf balls off his terrace. It was actually funny. And then there was a big party at Big Weld’s, but he was a bit of a jerk.

“Then, one day, [co-director Carlos [Saldanha] said, ‘Maybe he’s just playing dominoes’ — and then it clicked. I wanted it to be [Dave] Fleischer, Old Man of the Mountain, out of the inkwell, and suddenly everything goes crazy. Everyone thought I was crazy to do the ocean thing with the dominoes, but I thought it had to be big. A couple of the last shots we did in the movie were for that because it took a long time to get the technology together to do the dominoes. By the time it got on the screen, everyone in the effects crew was so jazzed.”

One of the big set pieces in Robots is the Domino Wave sequence. Here Rodney and Cappy walk in an ocean of two million dominoes before Big Weld surfs them for the ride of a lifetime. Detail of the dominoes is seen below.

Joyce is even amazed that Fox approved The Domino Wave, created through the rendering technique of Instancing, which defines the geometry of an individual domino and recreates it in volume. “I remember the day that Dominoes came to be… I think it was boarded by Moroni. I was in Louisiana and they were so freaked out by it that they sent me all the boards and we had a conference call with the Fox executives and Chris and Moroni. They asked me if I thought it was too weird, and I said it was perfect. The only courageous act there was the willingness to be completely insane. We started to get so nutty with it, that I’m actually stunned that we pulled it off. It’s so silly and seemingly trivial and yet it is one of the most complicated things.”