The Tech of the Peanuts

This article was about the technology that went behind animating the new Peanuts movie.  The director of the film Steve Martino said a lot during the production of the movie when in doubt go back to the comics. This is of course referencing the 2D look of the comics and cartoons and emulating that in the 3D movie. One way they did this was keeping the view of the characters limited to the way they originally looked by Charles Schultz. They would also have to occasionally sculpt a model specific to the camera or it could look off model. Another problem was facial expressions. This is of course making them look hand drawn but still 3D. To do this the animators had to create an entire new system for the lines to wrap around the face. So much work went into this that Autodesk put the feature into Maya afterwards. Another problem was that the characters would often go into extreme poses that the original model could not achieve. The solution was to model different meshes to fit the animation. Motion lines where also added on later to help give it the old animation look. Although it's a lot of work, Blue Sky ultimately achieved a look that looks almost exactly like the old 2D shorts but being done in 3D.
I liked this article. It was very interesting to see how they changed the rules to make their animation look like it was 2D. To me that's a very interesting concept and I respect how they did that process and how great it looks in the end.