It was my first day back at work at Dreamworks after a mind-bending week at burningman. My boss called me into his office and said,"Listen, Trolls is ramping up. It's the most hair-heavy show we've ever done, so we're building a dedicated team to re-work our hair pipeline. I want you on it." I might have had a mini panic attack.
For some reference, in our film pipeline modelers would make the geometry for a character and, at best, create some geometry that represented hair masses, then send into the ether of the pipeline. The actual hair itself was a whole 'nother complicated beast that would be handled by people who specialized in that discipline. So, to be asked to tackle hair, how it looks, moves and renders is like asking a plumber to "...redo the electrical wiring while you're in there". I'd been doing the same, specific task for a decade, so to be suddenly asked to do something so dramatically and technically different was daunting, especially considering the fact that I was just back from burningman and re-familiarizing myself with the idea that clothing was a requirement in the real world.
I'd just finished modeling the character Cooper who is best described as a "pink Rick James giraffe". I had a surreal moment where the model was approved, so I published him into the pipeline, then walked upstairs to my new desk in Character Effects and downloaded the character I'd just published to be handed off to myself. From there I got a crash course in Houdini, simulation, hair styling and the DW rendering pipeline. It was tough.
...but, with the help of the other talented people on the hair team I pulled it off. It made my brain hurt, and I put in a lot of long hours, but I did it. Cooper was a challenge because he had multiple different styles and simulations- His Dreadlocks, his neck fur and his body fur. I kept getting the note,"Make him feel softer". It's a tough note to address because you intuitively know what soft is, but when you're charged with making something "soft" what do you do? What makes a kitten look soft? how thick or thin is soft hair? How does soft hair move? I looked up tons of reference, but the best execution of soft I found were the trees in the movie "The Lorax".
I wanna frolic in that
I studied what they did- how the hairs clumped, tapered off and wafted at the tips. It wasn't easy since they had some rendering tech we didn't, but we made do. The groom was finally approved and I moved on. I worked on several of the character's grooms in some respect but the 3 characters that I worked on most were Cooper, the large blue troll and the fuzzy caterpillar. Check out the final product!
I love this clip because I'm intimately familiar with each of the troll's grooms and what the specific challenges were for the artist in charge. How does the main character Poppy's hair move differently at the base than the drooping tips? How do you simulate hair that is 3 times taller than the character himself? How do a clump of dreadlocks behave below a hair-tie vs above? Each of these things is something an amazing artist spent months figuring out, so a huge shout-out to those peeps!
It was an amazing experience because it taught me the danger of complacency. Over my career I've seen artists lose work because they were unable or unwilling to learn new skillsets. In film it's easy to get pigeonholed into a narrow skillset and get comfortable. If that skillset becomes obsolete, the artist is out of a job. In retrospect, I was getting dangerously close to that precipice. Since the hair team I've been fortunate enough to learn new skills constantly. Just outside my comfort zone is a great place to be.
