WALL•E floors the audiences in Pixar’s latest animation venture.
CGSociety :: Production Focus
30 June 2008, Renee Dunlop
Pixar’s latest industrious undertaking has hit the screens in the US, a story of a lonely robot meant for greater things. Spending his years on Earth cleaning up humanities garbage, the little trash compacter has more gizmos than a Swiss Army knife and more soul than his hollow chest can hold.
The artist’s quest to create him is a story that rivals WALL•E’s own. (William) Austin Lee, Character Modeler and Articulation Artist, and Animator Doug Frankel discuss how they brought the character to life, and Keith (Daniel) Klohn, one of the Effects Sequence Leads, shares how he accomplished some of the digital effects on the film.
The moment Lee saw the story reels, he knew WALL•E was a character he wanted to work on. He was thrilled when his boss gave the OK, and Lee spent the next three years perfecting the rolling personality. For roughly the first year, he worked closely with Production Artist Jay Shuster, defining characteristics the model and rigging required. “It was a lot of back and forth between modeling and rigging because I had to rough it in, go back and add things, rig it again, add some damage, then rig it up so the damage would work properly. Jay Shuster did this phone book sized packet worth of technical drawings. He would give me these drawings a little bit at a time and say,’ we are going to work on the treads today,’ or ‘work on the hands today.’“
The design required a hollow body in which WALL•E could stuff and compact the garbage while still storing all sorts of handy pop-out tools, from solar panels to treads. Shuster’s background in the automotive industry helped him to understand that no matter how many drawings are done, getting the model to appear like it’s functioning mechanically and not intersecting meant taking his 2D drawings and sculpting them in 3D space.
Beginning with primitive shapes to mock up the design, Lee, Shuster, and Directing Animator Angus MacLane worked in Maya and Pixar proprietary software Menv to be sure WALL•E could hit the poses and expressions that MacLane wanted, but still had the design aesthetic that Shuster wanted.
WALL•E was a character that didn’t actually speak or even have a nose or mouth, so his design had to allow for the ability to communicate through his body language, eye expressions, and a few mechanical sounds.
“Pixar believes in always improving the story,“ says Lee, “so we’ll start working on the character even before the story is finalized. We had to constantly modify the exterior design to fit the key story moments that would come up throughout the film.“ That meant alterations such as adding a compartment for a lighter that suddenly had story significance, or a heart panel that could fire up jumper cables and hold circuit boards connected with ribbon cables.
In the end, the WALL•E character required four different versions of the model. There was the model used in most of the shots that had sustained damage from his years of toil. That particular model had roughly 140,000 vertices, and the final Maya file for WALL•E was a whopping 168MB. “The joke on the show was, when I first modeled it, it was a little heavy because each one of his treads had as many points as Lightning McQueen from Cars, so it was like he was carrying around a Lightening McQueen on each foot.” There was also what they called “Clean WALL•E” with no damage, “Dead WALL•E” for when the terrain was scattered with broken robots, and a fourth model that Lee wouldn’t reveal because it was a spoiler, but turned out to be the most complicated to create.
