What Animation Software Was Used To Make Shrek

With franchises like Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, and Madagascar to its name, DreamWorks Animation has spent the concluding 20 years building an blitheness mini-empire. The studio's movies have pulled in over $eleven.5 billion in global box role, and, despite some recent underperformers, information technology'south continued to diversify with pushes into Boob tube, apps, and online initiatives. This weekend the studio is heading dorsum to flick theaters with the release of How To Train Your Dragon 2.

Written and directed by Dean DeBlois (Lilo & Stitch, the original How To Train Your Dragon) the movie is 1 of DreamWorks' most visually stunning films to date. Dragons swarm in ballsy boxing sequences; humans gracefully race, flip, and fly; and key dramatic moments are powered solely by the visual nuance of a computer-generated character's operation. It'southward a spring in terms of both spectacle and emotion, and at the middle of it was a new version of the studio'due south flagship animation software — one that's letting DreamWorks animators do more than they ever could before.

The older software was showing its age

Throughout the studio'due south history, it's relied on a custom slice of animation software named Emo. Originally developed in the 1980s by Pacific Information Images, Emo was designed to animate primitive graphics and text, but evolved into the kind of tool that could bring Princess Fiona and Puss in Boots to life. Despite several major overhauls, however, it had begun to evidence its historic period. Animators would take to work with rough geometric approximations of creatures rather than fully-realized models, or plow off different body parts birthday to get the software to run at an acceptable speed. Then in that location was rendering, which would tie up the workstation completely.

Like a lagging version of Photoshop, Emo simply wasn't using modern hardware to its full potential. Then five years agone, the studio met with its hardware partners HP and Intel to become a sense of where their respective products would be going in the years ahead. Realizing that a simple update wasn't going to get the job done, DreamWorks decided to rebuild its entire suite of production software from the footing upwards.

The Emo working environment in a scene from the original 'How To Train Your Dragon.'

DreamWorks CTO Lincoln Wallen went to the company's artists, asking them to daydream what kind of tools they would similar to use in a perfect world. "I think it very well," Simon Otto, caput of graphic symbol animation for Dragon two, tells me in a suite at the studio's Glendale headquarters. "One of the kickoff things was, "[What] if you just forget everything you're doing today?" People with backgrounds in all dissimilar types of animation were consulted — from 2nd blitheness, to stop-motion, to video games — in an try to create a software solution that could bring together the best of all possible worlds. "We created a large list of why certain mediums have advantages over others," he says. That list provided big-picture guidance for the software squad as information technology began building and iterating on a new animation tool for DreamWorks — and the end result is named Premo.

The differences between the two programs are obvious at outset glance. Rather than forcing animators to deal with rough approximations or partial versions of characters, Premo allows them to work with the fully realized and skinned characters, which they can interact with and modify in real time. Camera positions can be moved on the wing to go a better vantage point of a particular move, and thanks to robust support for the latest multi-core processors there's enough power to put as many different characters in a shot every bit the managing director wants (some of the sequences in Dragon ii feature dozens of different dragons flying around simultaneously). Rendering is even so a requirement, of course, only Premo does information technology all in the background without tieing the app up and preventing additional work. Otto showed me a demo of the software on a auto with 16 cores — quadrupling what you lot'd find in the base-level Mac Pro — and the moment he tweaked a graphic symbol's position the sequence re-rendered seamlessly without even the mildest hiccup.

Afterwards 5 years of development the result is Premo

A more natural way to animate

Merely while the raw ability is nice, that alone doesn't alter the way artists actually interact with the software. To give you an idea of how computer blitheness usually works, once a graphic symbol's design is locked in information technology gets handed off to a different department that "rigs" the model. That procedure substantially consists of creating the joints, limbs, and various points of articulation that the artists will afterward move around to pose the figure. (Imagine an quondam-school GI Joe action figure, but with i,500 to 2,000 different moveable parts.) In Emo, animators used their mouse to motion those pieces around, or edited the positions manually using a massive spreadsheet-like database. It was functional, but clunky to say the least.

With Premo, DreamWorks provided animators with large, pressure-sensitive screens from Wacom. Using the tip of their pen, they can collaborate directly with the CG grapheme — with the skin, muscles, and other elements responding in real time — resulting in an experience that's closer to posing a concrete model than it is to heed-numbing data entry. According to Otto, it'south a more firsthand, naturalistic way of working that allows for more than experimentation — but more than importantly, lets the artists broil more nuance into the final product.

An animator poses the face of Toothless in 'How To Train Your Dragon ii.'

How To Train Your Dragon 2 was the first DreamWorks film to use the studio's upgraded software suite — collectively known as Apollo — and animators point to several examples where Premo's influence shines through. A scene in which the character of Stoick (voiced past Gerard Butler) confronts a woman from his past plays out largely through the character'south facial expressions alone. It's a powerful piece of performance, and watching the conflicting emotions boxing on his face is merely remarkable. In that location'south also a sweetness moment where the dragon Toothless casts a longing glance back at his owner, Hiccup (Jay Baruchel). That moment didn't exist in the original storyboards, and if using the older software the animator would take needed to turn off everyone but the single character they were working on. With Premo, however, they could keep everything turned on — and similar an role player improvising in the moment, the animator saw the opportunity for an added interaction that makes the film better.

Despite all the advances, Otto is already looking by the immediate horizon, to when the studio'due south tools can put even more command in the easily of the animator. "I still desire to go to the final lighting of the movie," he says. Today, a given shot is commencement animated past an artist, and and then shipped off to the lighting department where the virtual cinematography is put into identify. A future version of Premo could conceivably swap that around, he says, allowing animators to move their characters around a fully-lit environment — though it would crave a complete reimagining of the computer animation workflow. "Now that's a long way," he smiles, "because that's really challenging."

How To Railroad train Your Dragon 2 opens Friday, June 13th. All images courtesy of DreamWorks Animation.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2014/6/12/5804070/the-amazing-animation-software-behind-how-to-train-your-dragon-2

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