Christine Waggoner, David Baraff
Abstract:
He's fat. Enormously so. Essentially a clothed sphere. (A very deformable and complexly animated sphere, with legs, arms, and no neck.) For Ratatouille, creating dynamic costumes for every human character in the film required extensive development and innovation in Pixar's cloth pipeline, particularly for the character Gusteau. Modeling and shepherding high-quality simulated costumes through the production of an animated feature is a feat in itself, let alone for a character with such extreme proportions who dramatically squashes, stretches, floats and bursts through the air. We describe the development of several new modeling and simulation techniques required for Gusteau's costume in Ratatouille. These techniques were required to deal with conflicting goals of rendering versus simulation meshes, deliver improved simulate cloth behavior, resolve impossible collision situations, and achieve director-mandated shapes on portions of Gusteau's costume.
Paper (PDF)
Available as Pixar Technical Memo #07-07