Monsters University was the third Pixar film that I’ve had the pleasure of being a part of as both a Character Cloth Artist and a Crowds Shot Artist. At Pixar, a Cloth Artist, also known as a Tailor around the studio, works within the Characters department to set up any clothing and accessories a character might be wearing in the film. The Cloth Artist both models these assets and sets up a simulation rig that is tested and ready to use in shot work by a Simulation TD. MU was an interesting film to be a part of as a Tailor because the clothing of the character also indicated their position or alignment at the school. For example, the clothing of the ROR Fraternity needed to feel unified so that while they’re wearing a mix of sweaters, t-shirts, and jackets, you know that all of those characters are with ROR anytime you see them on the screen. But we can get into that more later! I also was able to rejoin some of the crowds folks that I worked with on Cars 2 to fill the sewers and stadiums of MU with tons of crowd character variants. As a Crowds Shot Artist, we handle layout adjustments of characters, control which variants to use in a crowd, crowd density, adding locomotion (if any is necessary), applying state machine based animation cycles, and preparing each background character in the shot for some touch-up in the Animation department. Crowds are important because they indicate the opinions of the world that the protagonists exists within. For example, when a large body of characters take notice of a protagonist, whisper to each other, then begin to point and laugh, this could indicate that the other characters in the world may not respect our heroes, which could be a story point that they could be motivated to overcome. In MU, this type of thing happens all over the place, and while you might not always be staring directly at it, you’ll definitely feel it, when it’s done right.
But enough about all of that, lets take a look at some work! I’ve even included a few videos, compiled from public and trailer footage below. It’s not much, but it’s all that’s out there at the moment! 🙂
Cloth Artist
As a cloth artist I took on a variety of tasks on a number of character assets. In some cases, I would be responsible for the cloth modeling, rigging, and simulation setup of entire characters, and in others, just the rigging and simulation setup, depending on the schedule, etc.
For the ROR Fraternity, the assets that I modeled, rigged, and setup for simulation were Sullivan’s ROR Jacket (‘Worn’ and ‘Hanging’ variants) (Center), Javier Rios’ (aka “BugGuy”) Sweater (Left), and Reggie Jacobs’ (aka “Spikes”) ripped T-Shirt (Right).
Sully feeling pretty cool as a part of the RORs.
Javier’s Sweater and Reggie’s torn T-Shirt were a couple of the assets that I worked on.
Another pose of Javier (back left) and Reggie (front right) showing off. Hey, I also set up the Crowds on this shot!
Sullivan wearing the jacket that I helped setup during a game of…Monster Pong?
Other garments that I setup in full were Percy’s Jacket (Left) and Baboso’s Jacket (Front Right) seen in the image below:
Percy (left) and Baboso (front right), both rocking jackets that I worked on.
I even got a chance to do some of the rigging and simulation setup on all of the HSS Jackets, which were also modeled and rigged by Ian Krebbs-Smith:
The HSS garments that I helped rig and setup for simulation. These are some tough ladies.
With this, here are a few quick clips showing some of these garments in action, from the only film footage that’s available online at the moment!
Crowds Artist
I’m lucky enough to have worked on a crowds sequence that was released as a clip of the film online. Here it is:
It’s great to be able to show something like this in context! I worked on a large number of crowds shots on this film, but this is probably one of my favorite sequences because of how amped up everyone was. For this sequence, I was responsible for some of the layout of the crowds characters, the animation assignments (state machines) for their respective cycles, as well as some animation re-targeting of even more amplified animation cycles to see if we could really make this sequence in the sewers feel wild, like a jail riot.
In other sequences such as the stadium shots seen below, aside from the similar tasks mentioned previously, I also was tasked with adding props to the characters this time around, with a controlled distribution of the texture variants on the signs. From here, all of these shots, and others that you’ll see in the theater, are touched up by crowds animators, who really take some of the more “hero” background characters to the next level.
An amped up ROR crowd that I set up, in addition to adding all of the signs as character props.
To get a better feel of the crowds shots that I worked on on the film, here’s another compilation of some of my crowds work from footage that is currently released online in trailers and clips:
Thanks for checking this out! I hope everyone enjoys Monsters U!