Producer Clint Goldman (above) and Williams made a movie and built a facility at the same time.

The process of revising existing shots and reworking characters during production might have been close to insurmountable, but fortunately for Williams and C.O.R.E., their project had an eager and willing partner on the software side.

Other than a brief, deliberately surrealistic introductory sequence from Reel FX in Dallas (depicting father lion Samson’s legendary ferocity), C.O.R.E. used an animation package known as Houdini to animate The Wild in a close to photorealistic style. Houdini had never taken on an entire feature before and its developers, the Toronto-based Side Effects Software (located just down the street from C.O.R.E) were anxious to prove their baby could hold its own against the currently popular Maya as well as the proprietary programs developed in-house by other studios.

“Houdini was born as more of a TV tool, a general thing focused on the visual effects side of films and features,” says Warren Leathem, C.O.R.E.’s supervising lead animator. “Companies all used it for doing really good particle effects, dynamic stuff like that, but never for character animation at this level or size of a project.

“We used Houdini at C.O.R.E. for character work, we were familiar with it. We used it for maybe 30 or 50 shots in a movie: in Blade 2 we had vampires dissolving into ash, we created a monster hamster in Nutty Professor 2, but never for hundreds of shots like we have in this film — it was never tested to that extent before.

“It takes a lot to bring up a software package to be really good at animation. Side Effects actually gave us programmers and set up shop in our building. We had anywhere from five to 10 of their people here at any given time. If I needed something so the animators could work better, I would go into their office, bring them over to my desk and show them what we needed, rather than writing e-mails back and forth. They could give us that change within a day. That was a really good part of it, because we needed to build the package up quickly.

Warren Leathem, C.O.R.E.’s supervising lead animator put Houdini through its paces on this project. The software, never used on a feature before, took on character animation for hundreds of shots in The Wild.

“I was the only Houdini vet at the beginning of the project,” adds Leathem, whose interest in stop motion animation led him into CGI. “Because it’s a visual effects package, sometimes there’s a little intimidation factor of how complicated it can be. We tried to strip that all out so the animators would not have to know any of what’s going on in the background and just concentrate on building the character.”

According to Leathem, Houdini creates “Object Type Libraries” that package a character into a single node. The animator only needs to adjust the controls at hand and can ignore “the guts working behind the scenes.” Those controls still number around a thousand and give the animator the choice of working with either forward or inverse kinematics.

Robert Magee, Side Effects’ product marketing manager goes into more detail about Houdini’s character animation-friendly aspects. He points to “Digital Assets,” a feature that helps construct the character nodes and allows for studio-wide character updates via “a very strong referencing scheme. Most proprietary systems are designed to do that, but off the shelf software generally don’t. Maya has a referencing system for instance, but it’s got chinks in the armor so to speak. That part of it can be a little flaky in commercial software. Often people end up having to write a lot of scripts to transfer rigs and animation. A whole management process has to be put into place, whereas Digital Assets gives you all that for free.”

Houdini also allowed C.O.R.E. to build a paste-and-clip library where the animators could store and share their work. “There are mechanical steps that can speed up the production process,” explains Magee. “When somebody else is working on another shot, they can access other peoples’ library: ‘Oh somebody’s already done that pose.’ If things are similar enough, a walk or a run for instance, you can import a clip, customize and retime it for your shot.”

Side Effects helped Williams and C.O.R.E. set up their production pipeline before animation began. “There was time to plan,” says Magee. “C.O.R.E. did some very serious tests early on knowing that this project was coming and came up with a list of things needed to be production-ready.