In War for the Planet of the Apes, Weta Digital proved once again its status as a leading creature house, and one of the most accomplished at taking motion captured human performances and using that as a basis to further realize photoreal digital characters with meticulous attention to detail.
Academy Award nominee Daniel Barrett was Weta Digital’s animation supervisor on War for the Planet of the Apes. The other nominees in the visual effects category for the film are Joe Letteri, Dan Lemmon and Joel Whist. Here Barrett breaks down a few of the main challenges in translating human motion captured performance into digital apes, including dealing with, of all things, smiles.
One of the things we did very early on with our hero characters, is we looked at the eyes and brows of our actors and we worked out what we could get into the facial rigs, what we could get into the ape models, to try and match the eyes as best we could.
You may not guess it, but there’s a lot of Andy’s eyes and brows in Caesar, for example.
It’s a little bit trickier with say Karin Konoval. Karin played the Orangutan, Maurice. Though the faces are quite different, they almost don’t have brows, and they have quite particular eye shape -very almond shaped eyes.
Beyond that things start getting a little trickier. The human and the ape face start to diverge a little bit, certainly around the muzzle. There’s a fair bit of translation that goes on.
The kind of expressions that chimps use are sometimes almost the antithesis of what a human expression might mean. A smile is not really a smile in nature with a chimp. They bare the teeth and you’re not actually smiling at somebody.
Even aside from the fact that a smile doesn’t mean the same thing in a chimpanzee, it is one of the things that is potentially the hardest to bring through on a chimp face – to make it relatable for an audience, but not make the chimp look too menacing or too weird. We try to keep a library of successful smiles as we make them.
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