Like the Incredibles, Pixar formed teams to carry out specific tasks on the production of the film.

BD: But most of the R&D pertained to the characters?

RS: Yes, we had to completely revamp our entire character pipeline: how the models are rigged, what animation controls are provided and even how the animators interact with the models. The basic idea was to go more physical and for the first time at Pixar to build significant underpinnings for the human characters. Bob [Mr. Incredible] has skeleton, bones, muscles have attachment points on those bones, they move over those bones, they bulge, there’s a layer of fat, there’s skin over that and there’s super supra on top of that. This was all very new for us: If the goal is to perfectly match the live-action actor, there is a right answer. And that right answer is: When the skeleton is posed this way, the actor will look like this. That means that you can have a process for the animator who animates the skeletons and hands it off to the computer or the technical directors, but for us, who cares what’s right?

We’re into believability. What we came up with allowed animators to pose the characters in a way in which all that [physical stuff] was happening and in realtime. The physical was the thing you couldn’t run away from. But once you got there, you had the will and the means and the desire to caricature. On top of that, we had squash-and-stretch for the bones to give the characters more flexibility. And we had some fix up sculpt tools that would let the animators very specifically control what the physics should do. We learned with faces that in some cases reality can be a crutch. It’s the scary zombie thing you want to stay away from.

We don’t want all of the texture detail because we’re caricaturing. But if you take it all out, it looks like plastic or foam, so we had to make it more complex to make the simplicity work. We had to come up with a subsurface scattering technique where light goes in, bounces around, goes in here and comes out there. It’s an illusion that we’re holding together with forces of will at every moment.

BD: Sandra, what was it like setting up visual effects at Pixar?

Visual effects were another new challenge that Pixar had to tackle in The Incredibles.

Sandra Karpman: Pixar is not set up like an effects house, even though it has the talent and the tools. Pixar’s main pipeline is like a live-action set. When you do effects you bring in a second unit, you shoot it when the actors aren’t there, you shoot the actors against a bluescreen so you don’t blow them up and kill them. Our effects are still like a different beast. How are we going to shoehorn this fluid simulation into our factory pipeline that is so awesome at making sets and characters? We have the same problems as live action, but we just solve them slightly differently. The biggest challenge was the sheer volume of the effects shots. Pixar has done them before, and the effects in Finding Nemo were phenomenal and under appreciated by the effects community.

On top of doing the effects and making them fit in with what Brad wanted art direction-wise, it was very important to me that we put the effects into the complex Pixar pipeline so the lighters could light them in the same scene that they lit with the characters. We still had to layer our effects and composite them in as if they were a live-action plate. The only difference is that we didn’t have to do camera match move and full-body roto. The interesting thing is our effects were often actually the gag, such as when Bob slams the car door and the window shatters. Or when the little boy’s bubblegum pops.

BD: How many visual effects shots were there?

SK: There were 781. Explosions, water, debris, dust, clouds, fire, lava, lava bubbles. But what was different here was we got the effects approved while they were still animating. A good example was when the mother and kids are splashing around in the water. We made the water surface first, then got it approved by Brad so the animators knew where the waves were, so characters could interact with the ebb and flow of the waves. Then they animated to the main wave; we then brought it back and did the specific water surface to character interaction in effects.

So there were some pipelines that tied little bowties, which was unusual for Pixar. It was hard scheduling while waiting for animation… Brad really wanted the animators to sequence a shot so they were really connected, so that would be a drag waiting for all five shots in a sequence to be done. But we would find what we could do.