As you might twig from the title, Disney Animation Studioses' latest film Zootropolis (called Zootopia in the US) is set in a world run by animals: elephant ice-cream parlours, mouse mafia, buffalo police chiefs – you name it. As one might imagine, animating such a menagerie presented the studio – coming off a streak of hits, from Frozen to Big Hero 6 – with a rather hairy problem.
As with Pixar, Disney's sister studio, each new film starts with a research trip. Spencer's team travelled to Kenya, San Diego zoo and Disney's own animal theme park to research as many animals as possible – from their behavior and gait down to individual hairs. "So for the polar bears, we were amazed to discover that [the fur] is actually clear, and it's the way it's lit that creates that kind of white-yellow quality to it. So from there, we said, OK, we're going to have to create clear strands and light it," says Spencer. "We realized that a fox's fur is very dark, almost black, at the root, and then grades up to a light colour and red at the tip. And knowing we were going to be putting wind and things into the film, we're going to want to be able to see – when the fur separates – those different colours." Cheetahs' spots, they noted, are only on the surface – the black hair doesn't go down to the root. The same level of research went into the film's 64 different species for a total of around 800,000 character models.
They fed the research into a new tool, dubbed iGroom. The software helped animators create the film's ludicrously detailed characters: rabbit protagonist Judy Hops, for example, features around 2.5million individual strands. A giraffe boasts 4million. Even the film's smallest rodents feature more hairs than the entire cast of Frozen.
Sounds crazy? It doesn't stop there. "You have to think: OK, how would clothes sit on top of the actual fur? It has to not feel weird, it has to look real," says Spencer. "And you have to think about scale: how big is a stitch on a piece of clothing for a mouse, vs clothing on an elephant? And how big are the buttons?"
The pay-off shows: look closely and you can see the detail in a wolf's fur separating in high winds. It also demonstrates the pace of animation tech development: iGroom was not even possible as recently as 2008. "On Bolt, they just distorted the camera to make it look like the fur was blowing in the wind," says Spencer. Other technology, like the Hyperion engine developed for Big Hero 6, also contributed. (Expect it to go even further in the studio's next picture, the hotly anticipated South Pacific-set Moana.) "Some people may not notice it, some people will, but either way they're going to feel it, because the world feels that much richer and more alive."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
