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Tuesday, 22 February 2005 | bengisu
Interview with Lucas Ives, The Incredibles
During the past edition of Mundos Digitales, in A Coruña, Spain, we could know Lucas Ives, who spoke, together with our friend Carlos Baena, on the creation process of an animated movie in Pixar.
Lucas Ives, Technical Director in Pixar, worked previously in 'Finding Nemo' and, more recently, in 'The Incredibles', creating some systems for making easier the animators' work.
We have spoken with Lucas on his beginnings, his experience in 'Finding Nemo' and 'The Incredibles', as well as on the animation and simulation systems used in Pixar's last movie.
El Portal del 3D y la Animación - Before you worked in 'The Incredibles', you did it in another Pixar film, 'Finding Nemo', as Technical Director. Which has been your concrete work in these two films?
Lucas Ives - Since arriving at Pixar I've done mostly character work, designing articulation systems and software. We have our own in-house articulation system, and a lot of work goes into each show addressing the particular technical challenges the story creates.
On 'Finding Nemo', I built systems for controlling characters' fins, necks, arms and legs.
For 'The Incredibles', most of my time was spent building character deformation and clothing technology.
3DA - 'The Incredibles' is the first Pixar film carried out by humans. A muscle system has been used for character animation. What could you explain to us about this muscle system? How works this?
Lucas - We tried to build our characters "from the inside out", in example, instead of articulating the character as a bag of points, we pose the skeleton, the skeleton poses the muscles, and in turn the muscles pose the skin.
That gets us to a starting point, but a huge amount of craftsmanship is still required of the character team to make the characters believable.
... and not necessarily believable in our world, but in their own stylized world complete with superhero-style physics.
3DA - This muscle system has influenced anyway in the work of the animators?
Lucas - The animators worked very closely with the art and character design teams to get stylized, muscle-bound characters that had profiles they were happy with in most conceivable poses.
3DA - This film uses much more the principle Squash and Stretch than in the previous ones. What mechanisms have been used for this?
Paul - The squash and stretch controls themselves aren't complicated: decrease volume when stretching up and increase it when compressing. The real key to effective use of squash and stretch (aka "squetch") is putting it in the hands of a talented animator.
If used effectively, it does a great job of conveying the anticipation and follow through of an action.
Source in English: http://www.3dyanimacion.com/entrevistas/en...credibleseng002
Source in Spanish: http://www.3dyanimacion.com/entrevistas/en...sincredibles001
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