Because the series has layered, emotional storytelling, there was pressure on the storyboard team to convey a high level of detail from camera choices to the composition of shots to posing for emotion. And they did this on very tight deadlines. You don’t want to keep 50 animators waiting! Also, Storyboard artists don’t typically do backgrounds, buuuut, because the sets were so dynamic our board artists did that too, even sometimes referencing 3D models in their scenes! Wizards…I know.

A looot of research was done to achieve the desired chiseled toon-shaded look and feel. We tried a number of solutions, but ultimately had to develop and adapt new modeling techniques. We ended up using four different technologies before we loved our toonlines. One was a completely new 2D approach in Harmony. Because toon shading requires special care during surfacing, we outputted specific masks to cheat the termination line in lighting. Shhhhh! Trade secret!

The challenge in rigging was in transferring the toon lines on the face of the characters into animation. This is very expensive! Permalines were added when a specific character expression was desired. On another note, traditional animation is often worked on 2’s, meaning only half the frames are drawn. In 3D this is not an issue: the computer will take care of the in-betweens. But to mimic the feel of traditional 2D animation we had to develop many tools to help our 3D department work on 2’s.

One of the most amazing features of this pipeline was the ability to transfer the design work seamlessly into the 3D world. Design and assets worked closely with one another. A lot of the sets were built in 3D but the majority of them used advanced 2.5D techniques. This helped to maintain the 2D look with an ability to navigate with a 3D camera. The collaboration between design and assets using these technologies allowed us to achieve a better result, faster!

The animation style is a hybrid between CG and 2D. We wanted to leverage a 3D pipeline but also use 2D techniques to make the show feel hand-done and to eliminate the computer-like feeling. In leveraging the strengths of a CG pipeline we could achieve details on the character designs, costumes and sets that you can’t get in 2D animation. A lot of it was about achieving a style that would feel artful and hand-animated. Voila!

The 2D toon look required treatment for the FX elements. We had two teams working on it! Our 3D team looked after CG and figured out how to assetize FX that was hand-drawn in Harmony. Many 2D elements were reused in the 3D world, however some shots required hand-drawn FX. The 2D FX department also enhanced compositing by delicately perfecting toonlines, and adding shapes to the shadows on the face or body! A hybrid approach was used at times where the visual is given a CG element and enhanced by 2D. Complex effects like smoke were purely CG!

Many tools & techniques were developed in Lighting! Most of them were targeted at correcting toon lines on characters and sets. One of the challenges was automating the thinning of the line based on the distance of the camera. Multiple render engines were used to achieve the look. Because there were so many sets it was extremely complex! An incredible number of layers were rendered to give maximum versatility in compositing and to speed up the handoff to the client.

In comp we finalized the traditional 2D look using many tricks. For example, the 3D layers from lighting looked way too CG, so we had to create gizmos in Nuke to “toonize” the environment, while adding imperfections that only a brush could give. This helped us give the backgrounds a hand painted feeling. We also put the characters through treatment to remove unwanted toonlines which was very challenging! We deleted some and added others; and sometimes had to relight them entirely in the compositing suite. Phew!