The tool then had mappable controls for where and how much ink should spread based on how wet or dry the surface is. MaskToInk and PigmentMerge: painterly spots and pigmentsĪ tool called MaskToInk allowed Imageworks artists to render a simple mask as if it were made of wet ink. A script inside Katana sampled color and other data to attributes that were passed to Arnold (Imageworks’ version of Arnold), where a shader worked out final brush shape, color and visibility. Imageworks’ proprietary hair tool Fyber formed a new workflow through Katana to Arnold specifically to groom brush strokes onto the character Miguel, who has very specific contours. It was used for very specific and deliberate detailed strokes that could be applied to animated imagery, whereas Stoke System was generally relied upon to distribute tens of thousands of strokes in a scene. The new tool overcame a limitation of the original by being able to blend between layers or rendered layers to represent varying stroke opacity or bleeding colors.Ĭurve System is another Imageworks Nuke tool that allowed artists to create hand-drawn strokes. The first film had something similar–PatchyFindy–which was used to ‘mosaic’ up an image. Once you move that camera it has to still work and can’t look flat, and then you needed the ability to put brushstrokes wherever you wanted, to really make it effective.”Ī brush projection tool Imageworks built for the film was called PatchyBomby, again inside Nuke. “Everything couldn’t just all be going the same direction, so the brushstrokes had to live in 3D space. “We built the tool so that we could physically paint brushes on objects because we quickly learned that we needed to have brushstrokes move along the form for it to look right,” continues Lasker. The brushstrokes were used heavily for Gwen’s Earth-65 world (which actually changes constantly, almost like a mood ring), and Mumbattan, and could be used to represent anything from the beam from a headlight to a cloud of smoke. “We had to build new tools that would allow the artists to fill up these scenes with brush strokes, so one thing we built was this procedural brush stroking system, the Stroke System, and it would allow us to use different kinds of brushes and layer them on objects.” Lasker says this tool, and the other brush tools mentioned below, came about after Imageworks saw the very painterly production art department concept explorations for the different world looks. One of these, the Stroke System, was built inside Nuke and worked as a node-based tool that could render brushes in 3D space. Imageworks made several brush systems for the film. ” Stroke System: controlling brush strokes Some of it also integrated with the Stroke System. We could attach it to lights so when they cast a shadow, the shadow would be filled with line work or markers. With this tool, we could make it sketchy, we could make it clean, we could use it for shadows. This was the first CG animated movie I’ve ever heard of that actually had a dedicated inking team of artists that would go in and run inklines and dial inklines in sequences. “Our effects supervisor Pav Grochola oversaw the building of a new tool called Kismet in Houdini. For this new movie, we needed line work everywhere, different styles of lines, clean, architectural, messy, sketchy, painterly, everything.” In Mitchells, we did a lot of line work, but again, it wasn’t overly relied upon. The backgrounds were not heavy on line work. “On the first Spider-Verse,” explains Lasker, “we had created inklines on characters through animation and through FX. The linework, too, had to update as a character moved and be in sync with any changing animation frame rates. Inklines and outlining were things Imageworks dealt with in impressive creative ways on Into the Spider-Verse, but needed to find ways to go even further on this new film, while also retaining a ‘hand-drawn’, sometimes even messy, look and feel. And then with characters like Punk, we pushed even more onto 4s and 6s, making it really choppy and splitting limbs off so they could animate at different rates, and change costumes at different rates.” Kismet for linework But on the FX end is where it got a little tricky. “Generally,” says Lasker, “cloth and hair is typically going to follow what animation has done because it all has to sync up, and we’ve gotten pretty good at that.
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