Waggoner and the Cloth Team created over 140 garments for "The Incredibles" -- a massive, labor-intensive process that took over three years to complete in spite of the efficiency offered by virtual tailoring. To create each piece of clothing, tailor Maria Cervantes was hired to help create the costumes. "There were often times that I wished I could go shopping for a garment," says Waggoner. "Unfortunately, the proportions of our characters are so extreme, I would never be able to find such a garment. And of course things from the physical world cannot be imported into the computer without digitizing them or modeling them."

Waggoner worked with Cervantes and several other artists to create individual costumes for each character in each of his or her representations: There was a fat Bob, a thin Bob, a pre-retirement Mr. Incredible and Edna's new-and-improved Mr. Incredible. And that was really just the beginning.

"The characters were modeled in a multilayered fashion which attempts to emulate the physical world," Waggoner explains. "They all had muscles, skin and clothing. We used this approach in an effort to create a higher level of realism: muscles sliding under skin, and cloth sliding, resting or folding over skin. Some of the characters even had undergarments. Edna had a petticoat to support her dress. Bob had briefs sewn to his shirt to keep the shirt tucked in." (She learned that trick costuming dancers in the theater.) So was Bob as demanding as he seemed when dealing with Edna? "The actors don't complain about their costumes, but they also cannot tell you where it's too tight," says Waggoner.

Despite the seeming ease of computer-aided efficiency, challenges persisted. "We must model/simulate every detail of a costume, of the world," says Waggoner. "And this essentially boils down to mathematics and algorithms. What's the model/function for a ruffle, a shoulder pad or a bustle? If we wanted atomic accuracy, are their computers fast enough to handle those quantities of data? Is such an approach practical or necessary?"

In the movie, illustrated through a series of tragic instances, Edna recounts the many superheroes of the past who were ultimately done in by cape-related injuries --- snags being the most common danger. From Waggoner's perspective the cape problem is real; in CG animation capes present a litany of potential problems, the most difficult of which is the dreaded tangle -- in which a piece of cloth collides with itself. It's difficult for the computer to differentiate between the "wrong" side of the fabric and the "right."

"Yeah, Edna's right," Waggoner smiles. "Capes can be difficult."

So if you aspire to cartoonish superhero proportions, where your massive muscles and barrel chest allow you to leap computer-generated buildings with single, animated bounds, you should take a lesson from Mr. Incredible: Sew your underwear to your shirt. Congratulations, mere mortal, you're on your way to the life of super CG heroics.

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