Chris Wedge © Blue Sky Studios.

While Fox has given Wedge and his fellow animators more than the $60 million budgeted for Ice Age, it's still nowhere near as much as Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks spend. However, at least Wedge isn't limited to the simple, stylized backgrounds that he was forced to employ on his earlier blockbuster. "We're using a new production management system to keep it in check," he adds. "And we've developed internal tracking and a crew of people that constantly optimize the software, using shortcuts. We have a brand new render farm and a crew of about 200 compared to 170 on Ice Age."

Wedge estimates that Robots will contain around 30 virtual sets, and that they've already modeled and rigged more characters than they had in Ice Age. In terms of software, Blue Sky continues to use Maya for modeling and rendering along with their own proprietary programs for rendering, special effects and compositing, including CGI Studio, the rendering system based on the raytracing concept. "It's a bigger and faster than Ice Age," Wedge concedes. "The story has just bubbled from inside Blue Sky and is finding itself as we go along. I just feel closer to this."

While Robots remains in production for 18 months (Fox has set a release date of March 11, 2005), Wedge is about ready to script his eagerly awaited sequel to Ice Age. "The challenge is to reconnect with our characters in another story while exploring different aspects of them. The tight wire we're walking is we want to keep the crew fairly small." But rest assured, there's going to be plenty of screen time for the lovable Scrat.

When asked whatever happened to the dark side he exhibited in his Oscar-winning short, Bunny, Wedge playfully replies, "If you left me to my own devices, you'd probably get something more like Bunny."

Bill Desowitz is the editor of VFXWorld.com.