CGSociety – Horton Hears a Who
Hartline and his crew largely relied upon Maya, along with various plugs-ins to speed up workflow, as well as Linux boxes. An old tool called Follow Through was plied for tails, hair and anything that would flap in the wind. “Just by turning it on and tweaking the settings, you basically wouldn’t have to animate the tail,” he says. “It would figure out the tail’s density and what it would be like if you were to jump up and down. It would automatically do the motions for you.”
The real breakthrough was with hair, which can be labor-intensive and costly for animators. Since the Whos are essentially furry creations whose outfits are shaved into their fur, there could have been problems with penetration of objects such as a table. The trick was turning on the fur bodies in sections versus all at once. “You’re able to see the fur in Maya without rendering it or going through the other processes,” Hartline explains.
The modelers used Maya, and to some extent (largely because it was unchartered ground), Pixologic’s ZBrush and Autodesk’s Mudbox to rough out models, which helped with the editing process. Maya’s ubiquitous presence also could be found in the VFX department, which used Shake and Next Limit Technologies’ Real Flow 4.0 to export the data and proprietary tools, including CGI Studio where shots are rendered and processed, to massage and manipulate the data.
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