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A Digital Zoo

Aug 25, 2010 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff

Tippett Studio uses its animal magnetism for The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore.

While the Twilight wolves are emblematic of Tippett Studio's approach to animal animation, the most recent example can actually be seen in Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, with its hairless feline villain. "Our fur tool was created for the first Cats & Dogs," says VFX Supervisor Blair Clark. "And now after 10 years of refinement, we've done a hairless cat. We knew this character would be hard because there's no fur to help mask the problem areas. She's covered with a layer of peach fuzz, which we had to make sure didn't seem like a layer of synthetic skin."

The shaved look of Kitty Galore is actually similar to what Tippett's animators typically work with when crafting the performance of all digital animals. During the animation process, a translucent shell is provided to the animators to show what the volume of the animal will be when fur is added later. This prevents the problem of having the fur cover up musculature that the animator needs to see. Trying to animate a fully furred animal would be like working with a "Chia pet," according to Gibbons.

Cats & Dogs Animation Supervisor Will Groebe, who was responsible for a fully digital pigeon and a curly haired puppy as well as Kitty Galore, says, "Even if I could see all the fur immediately and was animating in Maya with a fully rendered character that I could move around in realtime, I'd still be struggling to make it look like it was acting and not being puppeted. It's always about the performance."

In the case of Kitty Galore, Clark wanted to provide the visual effects team with a famous film reference of what her performance could be like, and came up with Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond role in Sunset Boulevard. "She was crazy, but considered herself extremely hot," he says.

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The challenge is always to balance dramatic behavior with recognizable animal movements, like ear flicks and tail movements. "When you look at your pet, you see they do all these little things that you take for granted," Clark says. "In a performance with a CG animal, everyone is focused on it being CG and waiting for it to fail. If you don't nail one of those ear twitches, it discredits the whole performance."

Groebe agrees. "If the director wanted the cat to jump up on two legs and dance the Charleston, we'd still have to see what cat behaviors could we fit in," he says. "For example, our cat has to carry a mouse around in her hand. A cat can't walk on three legs nicely. So in those shots we have her take a step and pause and talk, so you don't realize that she can only put one front foot down because she's carrying something. All you see is the fluidity of that one step and don't notice that she wouldn't have been able to take two or three without appearing clunky."

Tippett Studio already has more virtual animals in development, and though the technology continues to improve, Groebe says one thing never changes. "People didn't think of Snow White as a drawing," he says. "It comes down to being inspired and making the animation look as real as possible and not like a digital image. The hardest thing is still the art."

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