Anthony Ra – Looking Outwards 05

Coco – Behind the scenes

Pixar Animation Studio is recognized as one of the leading producers in animation films and design computer graphics. One of their most recent projects I want to look at is “Coco”. Coco goes beyond just the CG animation in their work and instead used VFX (visual effects).

Within this movie, one of the clips of the behind the scenes I found is the computer graphics of the movement of cloth in skeletons. Using a series of meshes, graphic artists simulate those clothing on the skeletal characters.

However, the designers issued that the problem is that skeletons are made up of really tiny bones, and because the control points have to match for the clothes and bones, the movement would make some of the bones see through from the clothes. This basically looks like clothes sinking into the cracks of the bones like something falling in quicksand.

Their solution is a concept called continuous collision detection, where meshes detect all the collisions of selected objects. This works even if the object is moving really fast, which is prevalent is any characters in animation movies.