The animals of LAIKA's Wildwood
Set for release later this year, LAIKA's newest theatrical journey is going where no LAIKA film has gone before; into a secret world where humans and animals, both quadruped and anthropomorphic, live intertwined. For Wildwood, the craftspeople and artisans at LAIKA have created more animal puppets than ever before, and pushed stylized designs and realistic movement to the absolute limit.
LAIKA's practical departments are constantly determined to learn from themselves, and that is especially evident when viewing the external 'groom'; the hair, fur and feathers, of these puppets.
A new workflow had to be implemented in order to recreate physical and digital duplicates of coyotes on a mass scale; maquettes are scanned into a computer program where the fur can be adjusted and manipulated as needed for a more unique look between individual puppets. These strips of fur are then 3D printed and cast into silicone, to be cut out and hand-placed onto the practical puppets, individually, by hand, just like furred characters on previous films.
For puppets with shorter fur like horses, the digital 'CG Groom' consisted of each hair follicle being diamond-shaped four-sided polygonal tubes, in order to make the practical groom easier to print and more tactile. To preserve the fine detail, these grooms were printed in wax. Still, the initial model ended up being over-detailed and impractical for LAIKA's new pipeline; it was over 17 million polygons. The team remedied this by determining which strips of fur to keep based on follicle length, reducing resolution of other strands and 'baking' the remaining detail into the skin. Similarly, The General, a fantastically oversized Eagle (voiced by Angela Bassett!) is described by film director Travis Knight as “a miracle of craftsmanship and engineering". Across two identical puppets, over 9'000 [Nine thousand] feathers were laser-cut and placed on flexible fabric skin in order to help emulate what Knight calls 'the shapeshifting anatomy of birds'.
By implementing this new pipeline of digital to physical printing, the results were as follows; efficient scaling of puppet fabrication to meet demands of epic film, consistent material properties across practical and digital assets, and Seamless integration between practical puppets and digital doubles.
In conclusion, by leveraging the strengths of CG grooming into the puppet fabrication process at LAIKA, we were able to create a stop motion film at a scale unlike anything seen before, while staying true to the look and feel established in practical lookdev. This revolutionary fabrication pipeline led not only to greater efficiencies, but also to tighter integration of fully CG assets into the stop-motion world.
