We’re sitting in a “classroom” of some kind now – the chairs are far less welcoming – with Jude Brownbill, Jay Shuster, and Michael Comet, the Directing Animator, Production designer, and Character Supervisor of Cars 3, respectively.
“Now, this is interesting…” Michael is saying, as the now-familiar image of Storm appears simultaneously on the three televisions at the front of the room. “Because [Storm] is a next-generation racecar, he’s got a really low center of gravity. But when the mouth moves, we can’t have it scraping the ground. So we had to cheat the chin.” We watch a screen capture of an animator tweaking the area below Storm’s mouth – now, when he speaks, most of the movement happens where his nose would be.
The animating process, at least in the early stages, is a lot of back-and forth. There’s an idea for a thing, and that thing is drawn; the thing then becomes a sculpture, photos of the sculpture of the thing are taken, there is corrective drawing done over the photo of the sculpture of the drawing of the thing, etc. etc. To be honest, the level of detail that goes into constructing cars with eyes on their windshields is rather astounding. Take a headlight, for instance: rendered inside the animation engine is an entire real headlight, built with several glasses of differing thickness, a complex bulb and the proper cable slots, designed to slip snugly into Lightning McQueen’s cheekbones. We watch an animator pull it out and separate its components, and they lay across the screen like a blueprint for any complicated real-world object.
Regarding paint, too, the animation is meticulous: “For Cars 3, we really went into how paint works, with a whole new level of realism. Clear coat over base paint over primer… we can distinguish how shiny the clear coat is and how shiny the base paint is.” Each is rendered independently and then placed, one over the other, onto the body of the car. “We create everything you see, and oftentimes things that you don’t see,” muses Jay, as he flips a virtual car on its head. The axels underneath are now visible, and each function as any modern set of wheels would, the suspension and turning mechanism and lug bolts all in place. It suddenly makes a lot of sense that the press event is taking place at a racetrack.
The animators are quick to assure us that such sustained levels of realism are never meant to detract from whatever artistic choices go into the film, and that the creating of the Cars world never falls into rote photo-realism. Sometimes, they must cheat the chin.
The film hits theaters on June 16.
