The Character Team After the storyboards and reels are completed, the animation process begins, though not before a few preparatory steps are accomplished. The characters to be animated must first be created in the digital world. This process, which entails character sculpting, rigging and shading, is handled by a character team comprised of technical directors and artists. Basic character design is first worked out via physically sculpting a maquette figure of each character based on illustrations from the art department. While for past feature projects, such as "Monsters, Inc." and "Finding Nemo," Pixar artists would have scanned the maquette into the computer using a touch digitizer (accomplished by drawing a grid onto the figure and identifying each grid point in 3D space using a pen-like digitizing instrument), a different process was applied for "The Incredibles." "This time we did it entirely without digitizing," says Sayre. "We had a small team -- two people -- of digital sculptors. They literally just looked at the maquettes, talked to the head animators, the director and character designers, and sculpted directly into the machine." They used Maya software. "We've always had the opinion that 3D scanning is valuable if you're trying to match something directly, like tracing. But there are plenty of artists who don't need that step. A really good artist can just draw." The characters were then rigged using Pixar's proprietary rigging software. Rigging a character entails putting in the bones, joints and controls that enable a character to be choreographed. Rigging defines the ways in which a character moves when animated and encompasses everything from simple limb motion to facial expression. "This film was a big departure for us because it's all about humans, as opposed to animals or toys," said Sayre. "We had to almost completely overhaul the character rigging process to come up with a system that was more anatomically based, with bones, muscles and skin. You want the audience to feel like the characters are, say, being put in jeopardy, and the subtleties of how skin and bones move relative to each other help accomplish that." Not to say there's no hint of cartooniness. "Nobody's going to mistake them for real humans. They don't look like anybody you've ever seen." Once the characters are modeled and rigged, they were shaded. Shading defines the way the surface of an object or character responds to light, both in terms of color and texture. "A good analogy is the difference between human skin and plastic," Sayre explained. "They have might the same color, but the human skin is going to have light scattering around inside it, whereas plastic will have light bouncing directly off of it."