“When we’re first introduced to him, he’s like a seven. “Right at the beginning of the show was I assigned a broken variable to each Ron sequence with 10 being the most fouled-up Ron,” explains Leighton. It was important to keep track of the emotional state of Ron throughout the story. Sometimes it was right on with the physics, while in other cases we added a little bit of simulation on top to make it livelier.” The hat worked like an exclamation point for his animation. “I want to make sure that the intent of the shot is there. “I always love to work with an animator,” adds Denis. You want to drive that with some rigging constraints, put it into shape, and run a simulation on top of that to make it physically correct.” Some fun was had with the woolen hat worn by Ron. You could not run just a simulation on that because you have bad folding and shapes. “As soon as you push him against walls, or when Ron is chasing him in the park, you end up with weird shapes. “He has a fairly skinny body with a big jacket,” remarks Denis. Once we had the characters moving, we realized with DNEG that the art was fighting with the realism of the cloth simulation, so we had to find the middle ground.” An example of this is the bully named Rich. From his 2D designs, another artist, Michel Gillemain, did CG sculpts of the characters. “Our main character designer was Julien Bizat. Vine wanted to have graphic and stylized characters,” remarks Predal. That was probably our biggest effects simulation in the movie.” We also had to get interaction between the water and the set. We still have some white water, but decided to have them jump in where it wasn’t too crazy.
At one point you start to manage your world to budget. Barney and Ron jumping in the river came late in the process. We had to simplify that to get the intent of the visual without pulling you out of the movie. Initially, when we started to run those simulations with the characters creating angels in the grass, the grass was popping up left and right. “The grass was technically challenging because you want to make sure that you get the shape you want, with it still looking believable. “The tricky part was conveying the proper size and scale,” remarks Denis.
Not too big or small and surrounded by this beauty.’”Īn organic aesthetic was adopted for the forest. “We sent Production Designer Aurélien Predal to Eugene, Oregon, because I thought, ‘That city looks like it could be the right vibe. The story is an adventure that takes Barney and Ron into the wilderness, so it was important for us to find a landscape that worked.” Traveling on at train from San Francisco to Portland, Vine discovered his real-life inspiration for Barney’s hometown of Nonsuch. the Extra-Terrestrial and Stand by Me, were references. “We felt that this should be a couple of years in the future so it feels like a plausible world,” explains Vine. Ron’s Gone Wrong involves a manhunt as high-tech company Bubble attempts to capture its rogue B*Bot. We tried to optimize as much as possible the pipeline to get that back and forth.” “Audio was also something that we had to push on our side at DNEG, because with visual effects it’s less important, but for us it’s everything. “Everything from the storyboards, previs, animation, effects and lighting are from the sequence level,” states Visual Effects Supervisor Philippe Denis ( Trolls). Another difference is that animation is not shot driven.