Snow Job

"Snow is hard," says digital animation whiz Carl Ludwig. "There’s light bouncing all over the place." Ludwig is the VP of R&D for Blue Sky Studios, which won an Oscar four years ago for its short film Bunny. Blue Sky’s first feature, Ice Age (www.iceagemovie.com), opens nationwide on March 15, and like the earlier movie, […]

"Snow is hard," says digital animation whiz Carl Ludwig. "There's light bouncing all over the place." Ludwig is the VP of R&D for Blue Sky Studios, which won an Oscar four years ago for its short film Bunny. Blue Sky's first feature, Ice Age (www.iceagemovie.com), opens nationwide on March 15, and like the earlier movie, it flaunts the company's ambient lighting techniques. While F/X geeks will appreciate that the animation is ray-traced - a time-consuming and expensive approach that Blue Sky makes less so through a combination of software shortcuts - everyone can enjoy the end result: subtle but realistic highlights, such as shadows in the ridges of this ice cave, not to mention in each footprint. Blue Sky's next step? Another feature, of course.

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