Uncut
This is a great topic and one I’m happy to
research and write about. I’ve chosen to elaborate on the hair special effects
of two films: Final Fantasy: The Spirits
Within from 2001, and Pixar’s Brave from 2012. I remember watching Final Fantasy for the first time and
being amazed at the realism the film reached. I remember seeing Aki’s hair and
noticing how greatly special effects had evolved: it was not a visual
stylization of hair; it was a head full of real hair! Years later I had the
same feeling when I watched Brave.
Merida’s hair was so flowing and bouncy, and very believable. Clearly the innovation
with Aki’s hair paved the way for Merida’s curly locks. However nailing her
hair was now not only another visual effects problem overcome, it was
absolutely critical because it also served as the very personification of her
fiery, rebellious character. It seemed to me to be the actual main character of
the film.
Final Fantasy I thought was a big
film when it came out. Even though derived from a video game, it was one of the
first animated films to reach a new level of photorealism. Groundbreaking as it
was the first film that had human leads played by non-actors. I remember
thinking the backgrounds were stunning and monumental, and the sound design
being great, however, what made its presence solid was its heroine Aki, in
particular her hair. Pondering back, hair has been a tough hurdle for visual
effects artists because plainly there’s so much of it. Analyzing upon the
history of hair in animated films, it’s easy to discern why a head full of hair
was usually dealt with as one single shape. It takes a long time, energy, and
rendering power to create a full head of hair.
Evidently, animators have been diligently
working on techniques to smooth out the artistic process. Because in Final Fantasy the animators pushed for
realism rather than stylization, Aki’s hair was unlike anything we had seen
before. Being accustomed to the spiky and strandless hairs of early-generation films
and video games, the flowing silky hair of the movie’s heroine – 60,000 strands
-- was truly radical. Twenty percent of total production time was spent on
realistic animating these 60,000 strands of hair. For the first time on the big
screen a character’s hair could flip, whirl and refract light. To accomplish
this, for every second of film, it took 36 hours of render time at 24 fps.
On the other hand, Merida’s hair represented a once
again new breakthrough in digital hair. Her long and curly style took many
years to perfect, being much more complex than a straight style hair. Tight
curls interacted with each other, and this required its own technological
advances. Katherine Sarafian, a producer of Brave
said that “the computer really likes right angles and straight lines; the
computer hates anything organic and soft […] we then developed a whole new
system to compute the motion of Merida’s hair.” To arrive at this challenge of
making the hair look both rich in detail and natural, the Pixar engineers and
artists had to create the hair with its own kind of physics and gravity. Each
strand – 111,700 strands – was modeled individually.
To achieve the full head of curls, each strand
was started as a spring in Maya. The Pixar team created many kinds of springs:
short, long, thin, stretched, compressed, bouncy and stiff. In order to give
Merida’s hair volume, the springs were entered on the computer in layers. The
layers varied in length, size and flexibility of each curl. The challenge was
to create springs that were stiff in order to hold their curls but also to make
them soft in their movement. All this staying true to the character’s
personality, personified in her wild hair.
The red color posed as another challenge because
of its strong effects on light. Even with a
computer-generated head of hair, there were times during production when the
team needed to see a live Merida hair model. Famously, at one point the whole team had
access to a Merida wig that sat permanently outside the animator’s offices so
they could get submerged into her character.
In comparison with Aki’s hair, in Brave, with even more challenges but
with greater technological advances, for each second of film Merida’s hair took
8 minutes to render at 24 fps. It took almost three years to get the final
look, and two months alone were spent on the scene where Merida removes her
hood and the viewer sees the full volume of her hair.
Each film used the most up-to-date technology
available at the time of its conception to achieve realistic results. Final Fantasy unmistakably paved the way
for Pixar to create the rebellious locks of Merida. Even though cutting-edge at
the time, and while still impressive today, Final
Fantasy seems somewhat outdated in comparison with Brave’s pioneering new generation of hair strand technology. As an
animation lover, I have to say that I must watch these sorts of films twice:
the first time I’m focused on the story and the second time from a technical
aspect to get fully submerged in their awesome visual effects.