The sketch and finished design for the villain Ratchet.

There were lighting challenges as well in dealing with such a wide array of day and night scenes. “In the broad daylight scenes with all the metal characters, you want to get nice flaring highlights,” explains lighting supervisor Dave Esnault, “so in our renderer we have Extended Pixels, where the file format has values over 1, which gives you super bright pixels, and in our compositing, we have a little dial that you can play with that’s like an aperture in a camera. With so many metal objects, you would attract tiny highlights into that area and flare, so we had to do some tricks and flare it only selectively. Depending on how sunny it was, we might run a separate path just for the flaring and re-route everything else. And then for the night scenes, we had practical light sources that we didn’t have to deal with at all in Ice Age — streetlamps, lights on buildings — which were done in Materials or we had separate light sources set up.”

And what of the enhanced look that IMAX provides for its day-and-date large-format release as a result of its highly successful DMR remastering process? “They have an amazing process,” Wedge beams. “It doesn’t look degraded at all — it’s just gigantic and clean. I wanna know how they do it, just to help get the artifacts out of our stuff. “

Now, with Robots opening today, Wedge can go back to his creative seclusion at Blue Sky and do what he does best. “At Blue Sky, we just make whatever excites us and go for it. Is there pressure that so many people are making these movies? I honestly feel that competition is where someone is trying to beat you. Nobody is opening a CG-animated movie the same day as us. Disney and Pixar going head to head with DreamWorks for the summer audience is unfortunate to me. From where I sit right now, I think that all of this activity is an opportunity for us. It just means that if you’re going to make a movie like this as a filmmaker or an animator, you need somebody to pay for it. I don’t have tons of millions of dollars to pour into an animated feature. If I had it I would — that’s for sure. The market is there, the audience is there. If other people are out there doing it, good for them. Fortunately for us, I can think about the next movie we have to make.”

Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld.