“Inside Out 2” returns to the mind of newly minted teenager Riley just as headquarters is undergoing a sudden demolition to make room for something entirely unexpected: new Emotions! Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust, who’ve long been running a successful operation by all accounts, aren’t sure how to feel when Anxiety shows up. And it looks like she’s not alone.
In Inside Out 2, the character Anxiety required an advanced approach to modelling, leading Pixar to develop Curvenet and the Profile Mover. These tools made it possible to build a highly flexible and reusable hand rig. By manipulating curves and profiles directly on the model, artists could fine-tune shapes, adjust silhouettes, and maintain consistent deformation across many poses. This innovation greatly streamlined the rigging process and ensured that Anxiety’s expressive, nervous movements could be animated with precision and efficiency.
These tools enabled the creation of Pixar’s first fully articulated Hand Curvenet, designed as a rig that could be shared across the entire production. For the first time, artists could generate fully rigged hands for any character out-of-the-box, without needing to perform additional rigging work on the underlying geometry. This system functioned independently of variations in shape or topology, making it extremely versatile and dramatically reducing setup time. As a result, every character could benefit from consistent, high-quality hand articulation with minimal manual intervention.
The team devised a mouth corner rig consisting of three layers of controls. The first manipulates the outer silhouette of the mouth and face, allowing for broad adjustments to shape and expression. The second focuses on moving the mouth corners within the face silhouette, and the third is dedicated to refining the outer silhouette without affecting the teeth placement.
