“Code To The Cosmos: Animation Outside the Box, in Pixar’s Elio” by Crow, Lykkegaard and Anderson
Conference:
Type(s):
Title:
- Code To The Cosmos: Animation Outside the Box, in Pixar's Elio
Session/Category Title:
- Animating and Rendering Ooze
Presenter(s)/Author(s):
Moderator(s):
Abstract:
Amongst a variety of alien species in Pixar’s Elio – one of the more unusual characters in the film is the Universal Users Manual (or UUM for short) – a sentient alien book harboring all the answers to the universe. The UUM is a “character” consisting of a stack of pages with the ability to zoom along distinctly shaped paths and is rigged and animated in our traditional pipeline within our animation software, Presto, with the additional hookup of Houdini Engine (HE) to create the distinct look of the character with traditional FX layered on top. By hooking up a base shape to Houdini Engine we have the ability to combine native ease of manipulating a character in presto with the power and sophistication of our FX pipeline. We used a blend between rigs on a parametrized level making it possible to not only switch but blend in various ways between open and closed spline rigs and different control densities and with the ability to control one end of the character with one rig and the other end with another rig. To visualize the speech of the character we utilized the parameter values already existing on the hull shell and sampled these by animated live splines along the path to create a wave pattern. We discuss adapting the rig in late stages of the film when new performances of the character required breaking the pages out of their hull shell and having them move independently.
