Ever since Into The Spider-Verse premiered, some theatrical animation studios have been experimenting with new visual styles. Dreamworks’ The Wild Robot, opening September 27, will take the experimentation further than it’s ever gone by reinventing how CG environments are created.
In an interview with the website Polygon, director Chris Sanders (of Lilo & Stitch and How To Train Your Dragon fame) said he fell in love with the painted concept art for The Wild Robot and made it a goal for the production team to make the finished animated product “indiscernible from those explorations.”
To do so, the very process of how CG environments are created had to be rethought. From the very first moment the Light Cycles sped through the Grid or the Luxo Lamp swung its head, all computer animation has been made by creating polygons, then stretching textures over those polygons. Video games borrowed the same technique starting in the mid-90s.
But to create a truly painted world, The Wild Robot couldn’t have flat paint. “We could no longer wrap geometry with textures, which is what we’ve been doing in CG from the very beginning,” confessed Sanders. “We need the hand-painted look everywhere. Not just in the sky, but on the ground and in the trees, in bushes and flowers and everything. So that’s what they did. They found a way to paint dimensionally. So there is no geometry in the [environments.]”
That is correct: not a single rock, tree or plant was modeled. They are brushstrokes painted in different directions of the Z-Axis. Sanders went on to say that the only use of polygons in The Wild Robot is for the characters, which couldn’t be avoided — there is no way to 3D paint and rig a character to life, at least not yet. They did the best they could to hand-paint the character models and make them blend in.
The Wild Robot really does sound wild. The only question is if the story will be as good as the visuals, but with Sanders in charge odds are high. The film starts playing in theaters September 27.
