6 Open-Source Tools Used In The Production Of ‘The Wild Robot’
While Dreamworks Animation’s Oscar-nominated animated feature The Wild Robot wasn’t made entirely with open-source software, like its key competitor in the race, Flow, the film still relied extensively on open-source tools.
The Academy Software Foundation (ASF), the organization developed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and the Linux Foundation to promote and make accessible open-source software in the entertainment industry, recently revealed some of the open-source tools used in the production The Wild Robot.
These tools enabled diretor Chris Sanders and his creative and technical teams to generate and manage myriad assets that went into the creation of the film’s charming robot star, Roz (Lupita Nyong’o), her animal co-stars, their luminous environments, painterly renderings, and animated effects.
Let’s take a closer look at six of those open-source tools:
OpenColorIO: This color management tool enabled the filmmakers to create “a wide color gamut throughout the pipeline, creating a much more visceral and impactful experience for the audience,” as seen in the luminous natural environments that Roz encounters after she is stranded on a remote island.
The ASF elaborates:
“Backed by OpenColorIO’s configs and color management tooling, the use of expanded P3 and AP1 color spaces on the film provided the rich and vibrant color palette needed to represent the lush verdant natural world, yielding a wider gamut of hues akin to the saturated pigments available to a traditional painter.”
OpenEXR: New developments to this high-dynamic range, multi-channel image file format – which Industrial Light & Magic authored as open source technology in 1999 – enabled the creators of The Wild Robot to use “a hybrid Deep/Cryptomatte technique” that added to the film’s painterly aesthetic. The ASF describes “a layered Arbitrary Output Variable (AOV) data structure” that the filmmakers applied to foliage assets:
“This unlocked interactive compositing workflows on transparent geometry such as spatial-coherent filtering, soft broken edges, object smearing, intelligent simplification, texture projection, and painterly depth of field.”
OpenVDB: This volumetric tool enabled the filmmakers to create immersive effects, including stylized crashing waves seen as Roz is first washed up on the island, waterfalls, snow, blizzards, and a climactic forest fire featuring smoke and pyrotechnics.
Rez: A software packet management tool that, per ASF, enabled the throughput of “hundreds of versions of thousands of packages into stable configured environments. From Premo and MoonRay, to the scripts that define the pipeline and manage its data, and the libraries of the projects of ASWF, every asset and every frame of The Wild Robot was created with software built, released, and managed by Rez.”
OpenUSD: This pipeline management tool — Universal Scene Description software — originated at Pixar in 2013, which then released the technology as open source software in 2016. Per ASF, on The Wild Robot this software controlled, “every aspect of the creative visual storytelling process,” including 3d sculpted shapes, shaders, texture materials, animation rigs for the animals, and all camera and lighting data.
MoonRay: Another part of The Wild Robot’s “non-photoreal” (NPR) rendering aesthetic, this software is a development of Dreamworks Animation’s open source Monte Carlo Ray Tracer that dates back to 2019. Per ASF, the software leverages other open source technologies, including, “OpenImageIO for texture management, and Intel’s Embree ray tracing kernel and Open Image Denoise library”:
[I]mprovements in MoonRay shaders allowed artists to mimic a painter’s strategic simplification, flatten internal shading, swap textures via light-response, and coalesce high-frequency information. Adding support for the new hybrid Deep/Cryptomatte workflow to MoonRay enabled assets authored with brushed partial transparency to be further manipulated with sophisticated compositing operations.
These techniques were used to introduce a looser style on Roz over the course of the film, including brushstroke highlights, smeared edges, flattened shading, accent layers, a perturbed shadow terminator, and shadow detail removal. MoonRay’s rendered imagery tells Roz’s story as she adapts and evolves from an out-of-place futuristic robot into one of the natural creatures belonging to the hand-painted analog wilderness.
