Winston the bulldog turned out to be a real tough character, at least
as far as his animation was concerned. For talking-cat sequel
Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, a VFX team at
Rainmaker in Vancouver had to put a phony face on a live bulldog and
have the results look photoreal.

“We were all excited at the beginning because Winston didn’t have long
fur,” which is notoriously difficult to model in CG, says Charlene
Eberle, visual-effects supervisor at Rainmaker. “But what we didn’t
take into account was that he was a bulldog, and [his face was] made of
many different folds. He’s a difficult animal. He’s got jowls and
things that hang when he smiles and pants. It’s not just getting those
details, but getting those details to work as he’s speaking. So he was
a challenge to get locked down from the very
beginning.”

Eberle wasn’t a complete newbie to this kind of work. (She was an
on-set coordinator for Cats and Dogs and also did
muzzle replacement for the straight-to-video Doctor Dolittle
3.) And some techniques that were developed by CG supervisor
Nicholas Boughen for the first Garfield were carried over to this one.
But a major problem on Garfield: A Tail of Two
Kitties was that a technique that worked for one shot
wouldn’t work for another because Winston looked so different depending
on how he was photographed. “You can’t use the same model on the second
shot that you did on the first – maybe he was hot that day and really
panting,” Eberle explains. “So we had to manipulate the model on a
shot-by-shot basis, and make sure it was the same character every
time.”

To lay the groundwork, Rainmaker’s team went out to the set and spent a
day doing 3D scans of each animal they needed to animate in post. Those
scans are used by the modeling department to build rough wireframe
models that are used by the match-movers. At the same time, a greyscale
model of the animal’s face is being made, which the animators will use
to manipulate the shot. Incomplete versions of the animation were
approved by the film’s director, Tim Hill, and its animation
supervisor, Chris Bailey, before being finalized and
composited.

To make it all happen, Rainmaker used some proprietary software in
addition to Newtek LightWave 3D 8.5, Eyeon Fusion 4, Worley
Laboratories Sasquatch and Fprime, Iridas Framecycler and 2d3 Boujou
3.

“Once we got details of the anatomy and face locked down, we hit the
ground running,” says Eberle, noting that Rainmaker finished 180 shots
in eight weeks. The team worked on some other animals besides Winston,
which presented their own creative problems. A constant issue
throughout the process was surmounting the technical challenges of
making the creatures appear to talk while still remaining faithful to
their individual characters.

“Most of the animals were great – we worked on a ferret and a parrot –
but we had a jackrabbit who was not your store-bought, fluffy bunny. He
was very angular. At any given point they would switch the camera
angle, and he would prove a little bit more problematic. As human
beings, we try to add a little more fluff to an animal, because we have
it imprinted on our brain what the animal should look like, so we kept
having to give him a face-shaving and make him a little more angular –
and at the same time make him talk.”