Among the film’s other major accomplishments is a ground-locking system that kept the car firmly planted on the road, unless the story called for some exception to this rule. Characters supervisor Tim Milliron, who managed the group in charge of modeling, rigging and shading the characters, wrote the code for this program.
“The ground-locking system is one of the things I’m most proud of on this film,” says Milliron. “In the past, characters have never known about their environment in any way. A simulation pass was required if you wanted to make something like that happen. On CARS, this system is built into the models themselves, and as you move the car around, the vehicle sticks to the ground. It was one of those things that we do at Pixar where we knew going in that it had to be done, but we had no idea how to do it.”
Another major accomplishment for the Characters team was to come up with a universal rig that would work for practically every character. This means the same animation controls (or avars) could be applied to each of the nearly 100 unique car characters without creating new articulation components. The same basic chassis was also fitted to the geometry of each individual car, but the suspension was customized for each vehicle.
“We topped out at around 1,200 avars that the animators would touch,” explains Milliron. “Some characters, like Mater with his tow rig, obviously had more. More than ever, the avars were designed to work together. For example, there are four big avars for the mouth. There’s an avar that moves the mouth to the left, and to the right, something that moves the corner of the mouth up and down, a jaw up-down avar, and an avar that moves the corner of the mouth in and out.”
Milliron’s group was also responsible for the crowds of cars that inhabit the stands at the film’s opening and ending race sequences. With 120,000 cars in the stands, and an additional 2,000 in the infield, this easily qualifies as the biggest crowd scenes ever done at Pixar (far surpassing the milling ants in “A Bug’s Life”). Complicating the situation, all of the vehicles in this crowd have some animation on them.
To help capture the thrills and excitement of the film’s racing scenes, Jeremy Lasky, the director of photography responsible for camera and layout, and his team visited many car races, and had extensive talks with the camera experts who photographed such events. Veteran Fox Sports director Artie Kemper, a pioneer in televising car races, proved to be a great source of information.
According to Lasky, “Artie gave us really great notes about where he would typically place his cameras on the track. He also talked about shots that he wished he could get. We were able to do a lot of things that were impossible for him to do. We could put a camera under the car, place one on the middle of the track, set up a crane shot that comes down and have the cars race right over the top of the cameras. Artie told us that he wished he had those toys. The camera placement in CARS allowed us to put the audiences right in the middle of the excitement. We put them into a world they were familiar with, and then we hit them with shots that they’ve never seen. The film has these spectacular moments where the cars are ripping two millimeters past the camera lens, which is impossible in live-action, and we set it up for them to believe it’s possible.”
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