Explains Sayre: “It’s very typical in visual effects for an animator to animate a rigid skeleton, and that’s all they see. But with the complex characters in this film, that wasn’t going to be acceptable. What I think is groundbreaking is that we ended up building a system where the animators are essentially moving the underlying skeleton, and the muscles are being activated, and the fat layer is causing the skin to slide over the muscles, and then the skin is rendered. The animators can see all that happening while they’re working. When they move Bob, they’re posing his full muscle-skin-skeleton rig, and it’s happening essentially in real-time, giving them far more information and flexibility.”
Dissecting the weaknesses in computer-generated human characters further, the team turned to some of the body’s most traditionally “tricky” joints—especially the shoulder. “You may have noticed that it is very hard to get a convincing shoulder motion in CG animation. This is why you often see animated characters that have shoulders that are too broad!” notes Sayre. “We wanted to make a shoulder breakthrough on this film, so to speak.”
Once Bob was completely modeled, he served as a template to create the skeletons of the other characters—becoming the film’s Adam, in a sense. “With Bob, we really concentrated on achieving a high level of complexity in body motion,” says character supervisor Bill Wise. “Once we were able to rig his movements, we were able to use that same articulating skeleton for the other characters, with some changes, of course. A female character, for example, isn’t going to have as defined a musculature, but she’s still got a deltoid that pulls down over the top of the humerus. There’s still a collarbone there. And so you could reshape that same rig to fit any character.”
One character in particular proved to be especially challenging in her muscular movements: Helen Parr, alias Elastigirl, who had to be able to stretch, bend and fold into a vast array of pretzel shapes that would flummox the finest Yogi. Elastigirl pushed the animators one step further.
“Helen had probably the most complex articulation rig we’ve ever made,” comments Wise. “The animators could actually pull her body around into a parachute shape or stretch her arm out into a long ribbon of flesh and bone with control points. Christian Hoffman wrote a program called a ‘deformer’ to allow her to twist and turn as needed. She’s really unlike anything anyone’s ever created before.”
The Pixar animators also knew that the qualities that really create realism in a character are the appearance of skin and hair—revealing how the grandness of life is ironically best created through minor subtleties. In further important breakthroughs for the production, new approaches to lighting and shading the skin, as well as sculpting hairstyles, added yet another level of credibility to the characters.
The skin created for THE INCREDIBLES is purposely one step removed from the full imperfections of human flesh. Explains Sayre: “Brad was adamant from the beginning that he didn’t want the characters to have pores and hair follicles and freckles—he didn’t want them to look entirely human but rather a bit more abstract. So their skin texture is very, very simple as a conscious choice. But, as it turns out, creating simple skin that didn’t look fake was really hard. It’s one of those cases where simplicity was…complex!”
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