Painterly Fur and Feathers of The Wild Robot

For the Look Development of The Wild Robot, characters needed to exhibit the richness, physicality, and motion of real-world fur and feathers. But unlike a realistic simulation, the look mimics how an artist applies detail to a painting: in layers of brushstrokes that form simplified groupings of light and color, with surgical placement of highlights. ‬While fur and feathers are traditionally shaded as curves, these features needed to respond to light like continuous surfaces to better fit into the stylized painterly world. To achieve the desired look within our traditional modeling, grooming and simulation workflows, new Look Development tools were developed including new shaders, custom groom attributes, an all-new feather system and new LookDev lighting rigs. Custom normals, UVs and derivatives were baked into the groom curves that provided a continuous canvas for a new shader that used artist-controlled ramps to stylize how these curves respond to light at different angles. The shader provided separate layering for each of the specular and diffuse lobes, written out to additional “accent” AOVs. While the final look came together in compositing, our renderer added a mechanism to preview this look with its built-in Display Filter compositor. ‬The resulting characters meshed beautifully with the stylized organic island sets, while maintaining the desired physicality.‬‬