DreamWorks Animation hair and groom supervisor Victor Garza grew up in northern Mexico. This gave him access to American broadcast television, and helped him to understand American culture. Some of his favorite movies from his formative years are Back to The Future, Jurassic Park, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze, to name a few.
Victor Garza
“These movies are pretty fantastical, which explains my fascination with movie magic. This, in combination with my love for animated films like The Land Before Time and Aladdin, gave me a pretty good idea as to what I wanted to do when I grew up — to be part of the movie and animation industry.
With this path in mind, Garza found an educational program that helped build his skills in computer graphics. “Fast forward a few years later and a few jobs later, and I am now part of one of the most influential animation studios in the world: DreamWorks Animation.
Garza, who is a hair and groom supervisor, took some time to talk about his latest project, Dragons: The Nine Realms. It is streaming on Hulu.
How did you get started at DreamWorks and on Dragons: The Nine Realms?
I joined the DreamWorks Animation Television team early on, almost toward its inception. When DreamWorks made the newsworthy deal with Netflix to produce a large number of animated shows, they needed to hit the ground running, and I was lucky enough to have joined the team with the task of building the hair pipeline.
A few productions later and with the news that DreamWorks was developing a show that existed in the world of How To Train Your Dragon, I immediately perked up. Our team at DreamWorks Animation Television was tasked with developing the 3D pipeline and workflows that would bring this new vision of the world of Dragon to life.
Because the show builds on the world established in the How to Train Your Dragon films, we needed to show a sense of scale. The show also expanded on the existence of worlds within worlds that was explored in the most recent Dragon film, so we had to create these worlds with the needed variety and the scale necessary for dragons to fly around — all within a TV schedule.
What were some of the challenges you faced on the project?
My focus is on hair, so one unique challenge was creating braided hairdos. Creating hair is challenging in itself, and braids are much more complex. As a result, it requires a lot of forethought in building braided hair in CG. Even though we can cheat how hair is built to favor design over physical realism, we still looked at how real braids work to inform our approach when building these hairstyles.
Hair has traditionally been difficult when it comes to making it as realistic as possible. Can you talk about the strides in this area?
The difficulty comes from the fact that hair in the world of computer software does not have any physical mass. This means that hair doesn’t settle onto itself when you are grooming it, so you have to be extra aware of hair crashing through itself.
Hair software has gotten pretty sophisticated, yet it is still very technical, so we have to groom hair with “math,” in a sense. The shading and render engine play a huge role in the realism of hair. Thank you lighting artists, for making great hair grooms look even better.
Are you writing proprietary software to create hair? Is it built on Maya or another program? If so, how does that help?
While Maya does have hair solutions built into it, we looked at other plugin solutions that would be a better fit for a 3D production. We leverage the robustness of our chosen plugin (currently Peregrine Labs’ Yeti) with workflow tools that help alleviate the necessary technical side of a digital hair build, so that we can focus more of our time on the “art” side of the build. We need to be both engineers and stylists at the same time, so in fleshing out the workflows, I looked at what tools we would need to create to automate some aspects of a digital hair build.
Have you been working at home?
Yes. Given that this show was developed during the pandemic lockdown, I used my home computer setup. I built a new computer not long before the lockdown began, which was good timing. I did need to get a more ergonomically comfortable chair and a webcam, which I doubt many of us had before the lockdown.
