The animators played a crucial role in creating the characters’ performances, a fact not lost on Ray Romano. “We actors who voice the characters get a lot of credit for emoting, but it’s really the animators,” says Romano. “After a screening of ‘Ice Age,’ one of the writers on ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ got caught up in the emotion of the picture, and said to me, ‘Ray, you were very good in the picture.’ Of course, so much of the emotion and performance come from the animators, who worked years on the film.”
But Thurmeier gives due credit to the actors. “They inspire us tremendously,” he says. “A lot of what they provide is pure gold for the animators.”
Two of the new favorites for the animation team were Crash and Eddie, the hyper-active possums with a penchant for daredevil antics. “Everyone couldn’t wait to get their hands on Crash and Eddie,” says lead animator David Torres. “They’re like Scrat – you can do anything with them because of their high-energy physicality.”
The animators offer quick character animation highlights: “Manny’s all about the eye rolls and how you pose the brows and how fur covers a part of his face.” Adds David Torres, who spent much of the production animating Diego: “Diego has great range and energy because he’s a tiger. We made a few subtle changes from the first film – his eyes are closer together and more cat-like, and we made him more playful and less menacing; but he’s still much the same, and his sarcasm remains intact.” And Sid? “He isn’t super-subtle in his personality,” says Chu, ‘but he has subtle little movements in how he carries his weight, shifts his hips, and holds his arms. He’s always kind of semi-hunched.”
Scrat undergoes some of the biggest character-based changes. He’s still chasing the nut but the filmmakers have added new dimensions to his antics. In one scene, where he’s chased by a small army of snapping piranha, Scrat goes into Bruce Lee mode, displaying virtuoso martial arts moves that leave the deadly fish down and out.
As the animators were helping to create the character performances, the materials group, headed by Michael Eringis, was busy defining the look of the film’s surfaces, including skin, tusks, eyes and fur color. The materials group also worked on environmental surfaces, coming up with cool looks for ice, glaciers, rocks and trees – and creating subtle but important details like adding wear to the edges of rocks and trees.
Blue Sky Studios, the home of “Ice Age,” “Robots,” the Oscar-winning short “Bunny,” and now ICE AGE: THE MELTDOWN, is renowned for its proprietary software CGI Studio™, recognized as the industry’s best Ray Tracing program; Ray Tracing creates unique lighting scenarios, such as the way light scatters off the creatures’ fur, with every piece of hair casting shadows.
For ICE AGE: THE MELTDOWN, Blue Sky takes its groundbreaking technology to new levels, specifically in the rendering of fur and water.
Led by Fur and Feathers Supervisor Eric Mauer, the Blue Sky scientists rewrote existing fur rendering technology to create a subtle but important new look for the creatures. Instead of drawing hairs directly onto a character – as had been done on “Ice Age” – Mauer and his team used a Voxel (cube) rendering system, which actually renders the volume of the fur.
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