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Texture Painting Brings a Tropical Paradise to Life in Surf’s Up
By Meleah Maynard

Mike Yazijian, a senior texture artist at Sony Pictures Imageworks, worked on a little bit of everything during the making of the animated movie, Surf’s Up, including Big Z’s beach house, a laid-back surfer from Sheboygan named Chicken Joe, baby penguins, jungle scenes, foliage, waterfalls, even lava tubes that take main characters Cody and Lani on a wild ride beneath Pen Gu island. But if he has to choose which texture paintings he’s most proud of, he’s going with the beach scenes. “If only for aesthetic reasons,” Yazijian says. “Who doesn’t enjoy looking at swaying palm trees, clear water, and sandy beaches?”

Cody Maverick (voiced by Shia LaBeouf, left) and Chicken Joe (voiced by Jon Heder, right) in Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures Animation’s Surf’s Up.

Inspired by trips to fine art museums where he admires the works of Caravaggio, Velazquez, and Bouguereau, Yazijian strives to bring rich, realistic colors to his work at Sony Pictures Imageworks, where he has worked for the last two years. This devotion to realism served him well during the making of Surf’s Up, because the whole Sony Pictures team worked hard from the beginning to make the film feel as lifelike as possible.

“With a title like ‘Surf’s Up’ we knew we had to create a wave that would make surfers ache to get back in the water,” recalls production designer Paul Lasaine. Before developing their animation rig, the crew not only studied surfing videos, many of them took surfing lessons to ensure they understood how to mimic the ocean’s talent for making each wave unique.

Cody Maverick (voiced by Shia LaBeouf, left), Big Z (voiced by Jeff Bridges, center), and Lani (voiced by Zooey Deschanel, right) in Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures Animation’s Surf’s Up.

Sony’s matte painters used MAXON’s CINEMA 4D in the creation of lush environments like the island, where the big surfing competition takes place, and Cody’s home of Shiverpool, Antarctica. While Yazijian and the other talented texture artists who worked on the film used MAXON’S BodyPaint 3D to make textures for everything from detailed penguin feathers and grains of sand to entire beach scenes, including the textures of the surf shacks that dotted the beach.

Things went smoothly with the making of the film for the most part, says Yazijian, who has worked in the industry as a texture painter for eight years. But there were a few tricky things to navigate. “Our main challenge was working with large, heavy environments,” he continues. “Our goal was to be able to paint with loaded textures and being able to save them without crashing. One of the workarounds was to break up the large environments and work with smaller sets of models.”

Yazijian and the other artists used Maya to break up the large environments and smooth and export 3D models. They also enjoyed the ease with which they could do their painting within Adobe Photoshop. “We also used Photoshop for its image editing tools, layer masks, and adjustment layers,” Yazijian adds.

Big Z (voiced by Jeff Bridges, left) and Cody Maverick (voiced by Shia LaBeouf, right) in Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures Animation’s Surf’s Up.

One of the biggest hurdles the texture artists faced while working with the large-scale environments, Yazijian recalls, was “trying to match the look of the 2D production paintings and keep that same rich, organic, painterly look of the 3D models.”

The polygon count for CINEMA 4D scenes, for example, ranged from a few thousand polygons to more than a million for all of the objects in the environment. Scene sizes were equally large and wide-ranging, going from 30 megabytes to 150 megabytes or more and the total texture project size for environments or characters went from 500 megabytes to more than 1gigabyte.

“One of our main goals was to take the viewer to a tropical location,” says director Chris Buck. “We wanted to recreate that feeling you get when you step off the plane in a place like Tahiti or Hawaii, and you’re hit by that amazing scent in the air and the different light.”

Chicken Joe (voiced by Jon Heder, left) and Cody Maverick (voiced by Shia LaBeouf, right) in Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures Animation’s Surf’s Up.

In all, it took about two years to do all the texture painting for the film, says Yazijian. BodyPaint 3D played an enormous role in that process, allowing the artists to do things like work in a Linux environment, incorporate large amounts of data, and load hundreds of texture maps without a hitch.

“And the 3D painting tools are great,” he says before adding, “I also like the resolution independent projection export tool, the ability to customize bitmap brushes with various effects, saving keyboard shortcuts, and the ability to easily enable and disable 3D paint on multiple models. Those features are must haves for any individual who is serious about texture painting.”

Lani (voiced by Zooey Deschanel, left) and Cody Maverick (voiced by Shia LaBeouf, right) in Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures Animation’s Surf’s Up.