Rango

It took my awhile, but I finally got round to watching Rango. To begin with I didn't really take much interest in the film when it first came out, but now after watching I wish I did. Normally it's the narrative which gets my attention, however with this film I found I was really drawn into the texturing of each character. Normally I am far more interested in the actual animation itself, but I couldn't take my eyes away from how life-like these textures were.

I found myself wanting to find out how these textures were done after watching the film so I did a bit of research and this is what I found. At ILM (Industrial Light & Magic) viewpainters paint texture maps, in total they painted 37 buildings, 1,000 props, 28,000 set dressing objects - rocks, pebbles, grass, cactus. 130 characters. That is pretty amazing considering they did it in two and a half years. For Rango himself, they used ZBrush displacement to produce bump maps and scales for his skin. They had 120 different effects maps and 20 colour maps. The whole thing would have been so complex and time consuming, that 2 1/2 years doesn't seem enough, especially when you compare it to Pixar. Pixar normally take around 5 years from story to the final film, so for ILM to produce something as detailed as this is pretty incredible. I admit that to me their story was lacking a bit, I wasn't engaged in it too much and it seemed pretty predictable, however they made up with it with their characters and all the textures they produced.

Before this film came along I was never too bothered about textures, but after seeing this I would love to try and get better when I come to texture my models too. Obviously it would takes years to become skilled in this area and you would need the specific resources and software to help you along, but it shows that it is possible to achieve something so life-like and detailed.