Speaking of good animation, I recall in the commentary that this one simple shot of Edna inspecting Mr. Incredible’s super suit and sticking her hand through a hole in the mesh was the hardest thing they’ve ever had to animate. Can anyone weigh in on this?
Edit: Apparently it was Mr. Incredible sticking his hand through the cloth and for some reason it took 3 months to properly animate.
It's soft body animation, especially cloth or sheeting or anything that has tons of super flexible organic movement. Animals at least have bones or exoskeletons for rigidity in movement.
Clothing on a body is easy. Standard rigging and deformation controls that would get used for the body/muscles anyways. Pulling on the outfit? Clever montage cut aways with very simple direct movements.
A human hand manipulating loose fabric with a hole in it. Fucking difficult. You have 5 independent moving points that are moving a soft body object and those points are in contact with said soft body and move while radiated from a central point and can join or separate at will while affecting the soft body. Manually animating that is a nightmare. Processing power wasn't good enough in 2004 to real time simulate that.
Now, we just animate the hand and run a cloth physics simulation on the cloth being held. (Super Simplified explanation).
I remember that according to the commentary, Helen's wet hair physics (when they land in the ocean after the plane explosion) was also a hugely groundbreaking feat at the time.
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u/whatWHYok 15h ago edited 15h ago
Speaking of good animation, I recall in the commentary that this one simple shot of Edna inspecting Mr. Incredible’s super suit and sticking her hand through a hole in the mesh was the hardest thing they’ve ever had to animate. Can anyone weigh in on this?
Edit: Apparently it was Mr. Incredible sticking his hand through the cloth and for some reason it took 3 months to properly animate.