Pixar is already renowned for its pioneering work in cloth motion. The advances made with Boo’s T-shirt in “Monsters, Inc.” and the clothing in the Oscar® winning Pixar short, “Geri’s Game,” served as research and development for THE INCREDIBLES—which took these advances even further. Notes Brad Bird: “One of the things I learned on THE INCREDIBLES is that it is far easier to blow up a planet in CG animation than it is to have a character simply grab another person’s shirt! I saw that there was a lot of room for exciting new developments in these areas.”
Mark Henne and his team found an inventive new way to “bake” garments onto the characters, especially in the case of tight-fitting supersuits. Instead of simulating the clothing for each individual frame, this process analyzes the different poses and motion patterns for a character (including walking, spinning and elbow bending) and automatically creates the appropriate movement for the clothing. For example, when Bob sits in a chair, wearing his supersuit, the suit knows what to do and where to crease because it has already been through a comprehensive training set.
Due to the wide range of retro, futuristic and avant garde styles presented in THE INCREDIBLES, the film also relied more on traditional high fashion design than a conventional animated film.
“This film required an incredible range of very stylized garments, from gowns and business coats to capes and supersuits,” says Henne. “So we asked Christine Waggoner, one of our character technical artists, to serve as our costume designer. She built almost all of the outfits from scratch. Bryn Imagire, the film’s shading designer, would bring her sketches, photo reference and fabric samples, and Christine and Maria Cervantes (a tailor) would take those designs and implement a computer-generated garment. We take a lot of pride in the fact that our clothing was actually built from flat patterns just like fashions that are created in the real world.”
Now, with the universe and characters of THE INCREDIBLES fully animated, the effects team went to work adding the final, dazzling touches. The film’s effects supervisor (and an 18-year veteran of ILM), Sandra Karpman says this was by far the most ambitious effects effort she’s ever witnessed on any film of any genre. Karpman oversaw the creation of effects that delved into every possible natural element—from water to fire to ice (for Frozone’s super-cool antics). Indeed, more than one third of the final 2200-plus shots in the film include special effects.
“The effects seen in THE INCREDIBLES are completely fresh and very spectacular,” says Karpman. “The biggest leap from an effects standpoint is the fact that we have beautiful, amazing, 3-D volumetric clouds that you can actually fly through. Most clouds in other effects movies or even previous CG films are matte paintings or stock photography. In our film, when Helen is in the airplane flying through the clouds, it’s very 3-D and you see the clouds moving against each other. They’re transparent and if you stack them they become opaque. It’s very beautiful. This same proprietary shader program (Atmos) that allowed us to do clouds also gave us the ability to do great explosions. We ended up doing a lot of things we’ve never imagined doing before.”
Movie Database
In Theaters
