VFX News

25 Best Free 3D Models Sites

2011-06-13T22:04:00.000-07:00

3D models are almost everywhere! As you know, today 3D models are used not only in movie industry, for creating cartoons, for computer and video games, but also they are widely used in medicine, architecture and other important spheres of humans’ life. So there is no doubt that sites where you can download 3D models for free sometimes can be very handy. And that is why to your attention we would like to present a collection of sites where you can easily find and download 3D models for any occasions! Hope you’ll find it useful!
Note: Some of these 3D models are not allowed for commercial usage because of the limited rights, so we strongly recommend you to check the rights before using any of these models in business projects.

3dexport.com

One of the best shops for selling 3d models. It has a large database of only high quality content, user-friendly interface, support for conversion of models in various formats – all this makes 3dexport.com extremely attractive to users.The site has a fairly large selection of free patterns – just use the price filter in the search parameters.

Turbosquid.com

TurboSquid was founded in 2000 to serve the 3D model industry. There are more than 7000 free models in different formats on this site.

3dtotal.com

One of the oldest 3D portals. On this site you can find free models in free stuff section.

Fallingpixel.com

American shop for selling 3d content. The site has a pretty impressive collection of free models.

The3dstudio.com

The market leader in sales of 3d models, along with turbosquid. Has an extensive database of models among which there is a large amount of free content.

3dm3.com

The site has existed since 2001. At the moment it is one of the largest 3D portals where you can always find the latest news, tutorials, and of course free models.

Archive3d.net

A collection of resources consists of more than 15 000 free models. Downloading the content does not require registration

Google 3D Warehouse

The Google 3D Warehouse is a free, online repository where you can find, share, store, and collaborate on 3D models. The easiest way to share your model of a place with the millions of Google Earth users is to upload it to the Google 3D Warehouse.

3dxtras.com

On this site you’ll find more than 9000 free 3d models. Downloading the content requires registration.

3dmodelfree.com

All models on the site are in 3ds format. Downloading content does not require registration.

Dlegend.com

On the site of this design studio you can download 3dmodels without registration.

Artist-3d.com

Graphic design digital art media exchange directory of non-commercial 3ds models.

Nasa.gov

Here you’ll find a growing collection of 3D models, textures, and images from inside NASA. All of these resources are free to download and use.

Exchange3d.com

In the gallery of this store you will find a small collection of free models in various formats.

Mr-cad.com

Mr. Furniture is an exclusive collection of 3D furniture models from Mr. CAD, a group of enthusiastic 3D and architectural design professionals. Our effort has been to create the largest collection of professional quality 3D models. These models are created so that they can be instantly used in any rendering or a 3D scene, thereby becoming immensely time-saving for any professional designer or an architect.

Sharecg.com

Great collection of shared free 3d models. Downloading the content requires registration .

3delicious.net

Delicious free 3d models.

Cg-files.com

On this site you will find many qualitative models. Downloading does not require registration.

Top3d.net

Another shop that sells models. Here you can find a large number of free content.

Oyonale.com

Some free OBJ models..

Dmi-3d.net

Collection of free car 3d models.

Renderlight.it

Free collections of 3D modeling, shaders, textures and materials, tutorials to know the procedures to get high quality render images and animations and more.

Kit3dmodels.com

On the site of this design studio you can download a small amount of furniture models without registration.

3d-auto-club.blogspot.com

Another one collection of free car 3d models.

Model3d.biz

More than 480 3d models in free section.

VFX in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

2011-06-09T12:05:00.000-07:00

The mermaids were enhanced by a new ILM facial system that decomposes expressions into individual shapes and a new application of Imocap. Images © Disney Enterprises Inc.

For Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Industrial Light & Magic got to play in the water with mermaids, the Fountain of Youth and shrunken ships in bottles for 300 vfx shots. It was certainly a departure from the crustacean-like creatures and apocalyptic mayhem of the previous Pirates trilogy.
And for Ben Snow, ILM's visual effects supervisor, it was a nice change of pace from the hard surface challenges of the Iron Man franchise. The mermaids were especially different, appearing beautiful and human outside the water to entice and entrap the pirate victims and then menacing underwater with deadly fangs. But rather than going completely CG, they decided to apply a hybrid approach, in keeping with director Rob Marshall's glam aesthetic and desire to retain as much of the live-action performance as possible, particularly when it came to the hero mermaid, Syrena, played by Astrid Berges-Frisbey.
"The look of the mermaids was important," Snow says. "We conceived them as having an inner body that had all the scale texture on them and then an outer membrane that made them look human when they got out of the water. They evolved from being a little more human to a little more creature-like with vestigial gills, but we pulled back on that.
The fin was made more elegant by being proportionally larger than the actress' legs.

"It's a different performance capture challenge," he adds. "In this case, we had to take the scales and match them to the actual bodies and so it was a much more sheer transformation. We came up with new techniques and new tracking costume designs to help automate that: a nice smooth blend of an abdomen to a tail. Or put scales up on arms or faces. Briefly, you see transformations, so we had to match facial performances as well. So we came up with some facial tools."
According to Tim Harrington, ILM's animation supervisor, the facial capture was driven by two Mova Contour sessions: one to create the facial animation rig and another performance session of the actress watching previs or the shot (ADR style) on a monitor.
"Astrid did about 80 different facial expressions and we have a new proprietary system at ILM where we can take a group of expressions and decompose them into all of the individual shapes that create our facial rig," Harrington explains. "We started by creating a 1:1 match of Astrid and it was one of the most accurate digital doubles ever done at ILM. On top of that, we wanted to either be able to do facial MoCap or to animate by hand the way we did Davy. There were some transformation shots where we were just going to copy the performance from the plate, so we needed to have both approaches and a system that could handle both [as a hybrid]. We had a new Imocap set up for her because she was going to be in water and basically nude. We applied markers using a tattoo stencil on her arm instead of the traditional bands of Velcro to capture her upper body. It would then go to animation and we would attach our mermaid to that and animate the tail [designed by Aaron McBride] using her legs as a basis. We came up with a big fin that was long and elegant that could be simulated."
ILM decided on a more dramatic approach to have the ships look like they're frozen in time at the moment of capture.

New tools for water and interaction with the mermaids were also created. "The idea of taking 30 creatures with all this streaming stuff (flowing hair and tendrils), and then running them through a full-on cloth sim was never going to happen," Snow suggests. "We worked out a way to bake all of these simulations into the cycle, and even some simplified simulation tools that the technical directors could run just so we didn't have to use our creature team to do first passes on all these things. And, likewise, we developed a bunch of little library splashes and then a means of plugging those in so that as the mermaids are attacking, they could automatically generate different types of splashes. It was really layers of tools on top of the simulation engines to make them run faster and easier to do.
ILM not only used its PhysBAM fluid sim engine, but it also applied the Plume GPU-accelerated technique developed with NVIDIA for smoke and fire on The Last Airbender. This was used for mist and for overall fast turnaround. ILM also used Houdini and Maya for additional sim help. "It was handy to have automated tools to help the artists and Rob Marshall to read the animation," Snow adds. "If the mermaid was moving in space, looking almost flat shaded, you could more easily buy the hardware render. But if we didn't put the splashes in quickly, it didn't look fast or powerful enough. The water interaction was key to selling the performance, and we learned a lot about getting characters to move through water convincingly. You had to have accurate-looking simulations right out of the box to show that the animation was performing well."
ILM collaborated with Scanline VFX for the triggering of the Fountain of Youth, beginning with a droplet of water running along a leaf, and then when water flows along the walls of the cave to make a portal. However, for a spectacular liquefying death resulting in a nasty skeleton, ILM scrambled to get some extra water sim by adding a whirling effect. There were some rendered surfaces, meta-surfaces for more of a glossy look, different layers of particle sim created with PhysBAM and the simulation tools and some practical water.
Macro photography was used for this surprise appearance by the monkey.

Finally, for the effect of shrinking ships in bottles (including the Black Pearl), this involved setting up simulations in San Francisco by Chris Foreman and then working with Mohen Leo and the Singapore team. They executed most of the shots.
"Initially, we just thought that the ships would be affected by the light in the room that they're in," Snow explains. "But then this idea came to have the ships look like they're frozen in time at the moment of capture: in battle or in a snowstorm in the Arctic or in a storm at sea. The art department made several bottles with real model ships inside. For the wider shots, we replaced our key ones of those and essentially added movement to some of the others. And then as we got closer, they became fully CG. We even played with macro photography on some shots.
"There were a couple of happy accidents where the compositors went over the top with a big explosion. I initially had them hold it back. But I showed Rob Marshall the early take and he requested that we go back to the bigger explosion."

VFX of X-Men:Origin

2011-06-09T12:03:00.000-07:00

Getting the refraction and reflection just right was tough so she didn't look like jell-O or a mass of polygons. Courtesy of Fox.

In X-Men: First Class, the origin of the X-Men world is born during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, with Charles Xavier/Professor X (James McAvoy) and Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto meeting and becoming friends and rivals. The VFX challenge was to visually convey the nascent super powers in exciting and diverse ways, including Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), Emma Frost (January Jones) and the supper baddie, Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon).
John Dykstra, a legend in the VFX world, of course, is no stranger to comic superheroes (Spider-Man). But, as the visual effects designer, he was faced with some new challenges in turning out 1,150 shots: time and budgetary constraints and collaborating with global vendors (among them Digital Domain, Rhythm & Hues, MPC, Cinesite, Weta Digital, Method Studios and Luma Pictures).
"We had a very collapsed schedule," Dykstra concedes. "It was slightly less than a year and I've never done anything like that before (Spider-Man was frequently two years). It was a unique experience for me and I had my misgivings about it, but I really liked [director] Matthew Vaughn's irreverent approach to Kick-Ass. And one of the things I think that the superhero genre lacks is the ability to poke fun at itself. The characters are self-deprecating and I love the whole idea of it being the '60s. When he talked to me initially, he said he wanted it to have the feeling of a James Bond film, and I think it does. We shot in England in the wintertime, and, of course, this is an iconic American film, so the challenge was to find environments that either echoed the American environment feeling or that could be enhanced to look as though the stuff was shot here. The idea also was not to make a movie that looked like it was shot in the '60s…"
Shaw is quite the energy absorber and V-ray and rendering out of the box proved instrumental.

Dykstra got the most creative pleasure out of helping come up with the look of the iconic super powers. "In an odd way, it's like a poem: it wants to capture the essence of what the power is in a simple visual term that everybody can understand," he suggests. "Of course, some are cooler than others, so we ended up creating a very broad range of visual options for these characters, mostly in illustrations, and then we picked through the images we thought were most representative of the powers and who the characters were supposed to be.
"The most challenging thing was to come up with a range of super powers that didn't overlap each other hugely and that we could execute smoothly using Matthew's preference for original photography. We were also constrained by time in terms of preparing things from scratch."

For Shaw, the idea was to convey his ability to absorb energy like a big battery and then unleash it. All of Shaw's scenes were handled by Digital Domain, which principally focused on animating Shaw and handling certain CG environments such as the atrium and mirror room. DD's team consisted of Jay Barton (vfx supervisor), Nikos Kalaitzidis (digital effects supervisor), Bernd Angerer (animation supervisor), Brian Gazdik (effects animation supervisor) and Dan Platt (character modeling lead).
Not surprisingly, the technique for creating CG humans on this one was different from both Benjamin Button and Clu: "We only had a few months to do 100 shots," Kalaitzidis suggests. "We used witness cams so all the animation had to be done by hand for Kevin's performance, and he has quite a distinctive walk and swagger. The mirror room was shot on greenscreen and we had to recreate this digital environment with animated versions of Shaw and Magneto as well as CG body doubles to reflect in the mirrors infinitely. In the past, we used mental ray for CG heads, but here we switched to Vray because we had a lot of motion blur and reflections in the mirrors, so we wanted a renderer that could utilize both.
For Mystique, the scales are slightly longer and transformation showier.

"With Kevin Bacon's head and face, we tried to do all the look dev within the final render, within lighting itself, and then do most of the tweaks in compositing when it came to the reflections," he continues. "So we knew we had to do this out of the box immediately."
For Mystique, Rhythm & Hues (under the supervision of Greg Steele) took her transition to a more sophisticated level, according to Dykstra. "In an odd way, the conceit is that when Mystique was younger she did this transformation in a slightly different way: the scales being slightly longer and the transformation being slightly showier than when she became the more mature Rebecca."
Rhythm & Hues also did Angel's wings (modeled after a dragon fly); however, Emma Frost, which posed another significant challenge. Dykstra says they made her like a faceted crystal as opposed to a piece of glass. "That was tough getting the refraction and reflection just right, and the sharpness of the edges so she was able to move without looking like she was made of jell-o or the polygon model of a human being. It's all algorithms: figuring out how much refraction to mix in, how much reflection to include and how much world noise to include as these facets adjust relative to one another for her to be able to move."
Meanwhile, Havok (Lucas Till) required a particular character arc to his light effect, which was done by Luma Pictures (supervised by Vince Cirelli). "He learns how to master its execution which starts out as rings that go in all directions like a light bulb," Dykstra adds.
Beast was a cameo with greater impact without dwelling on his wolf-like transformation.

Then there's Beast (Nicholas Hoult), which was created by MPC (under the supervision of Nicolas Aithadi). The thing that was unique about it was the lack of time spent studying the transformation," Dykstra offers. And that was Matthew's choice: he chose to make it much more of a cameo. And I think that was successful. Frankly, we've seen those kinds of things happened and a very smart choice on his part."
And what's the big take away on this X-Men prequel?
"There's good news and bad news," Dykstra suggests. "The good news is that we succeeded and I'm proud of the work; the bad news is that we succeeded, which means it will be the standard for how these movies will be made. We were very, very fortunate. We had a director willing to give us responsibility and to trust us to provide him with what he needed, and that decision-making process was collapsed. I hope this doesn't become the norm, but, having said that, I'm sure this will become the norm."

Rendering a Fast and Furious CG Train

2011-05-01T23:51:00.000-07:00

Rendering a Fast and Furious CG Train

Dust and sunlight created all sorts of reflection problems in pulling off the train. Courtesy of Universal

Suddenly, CG trains are all the rage, what with Unstoppable, Source Code, Water for Elephants and now Fast Five.In fact, for the thrilling train heist that opens the fifth Fast and Furious film, MPC Vancouver (under the supervision of Guillaume Rocheron) handled around 240 shots. These included a CG train, CG bridge, CG dust, extension to a practical train, digital doubles for Vin Diesel and Paul Walker and other digital stunts and face replacements and CG sets for the entire canyon shot nearly all by second unit in the flat Arizona desert.
Of course, there were quite a few challenges in mixing and matching practical and CG elements (since Rocheron was working on Sucker Punch, MPC's Jessica Norman from the London office was the onset supervisor in Arizona). But the primary focus was the train. While there was a real train on set with one passenger car and three baggage cars on set, MPC's job was to give the illusion of a high-speed train, which ultimately crashes into the bridge. That could be accomplished through extension by adding an extra car and the engine, or by replacing with a full-CG train, depending on the shot.
"For that train, we took thousands of pictures from different angles and different times of day to really identify how the reflections were behaving, which presented a challenge because we're in a very bright environment," Rocheron explains. "Normally, we try to avoid as many reflections as possible. You want the most flat-lit train, which wasn't doable, and because of the size we couldn't do a cross polarized shoot like we do for actors. So we had to create some artificial lighting to be able texture very flat lighting references so none of the textures would be biased with already baked in reflections or tints."

The bridge was patched together from different reference that fit with the setting and circumstance.

However, dust became a problem, too, because that altered the reflections in every shot as well.
"And the train was made of different types of metal, so it was going on a shot for shot basis," Rocheron continues. "You have the bottom section that's made of aluminum, the center section that is a glossy metal and then the roof that is made of a different metal. We had a hard time [getting] the right values for shaders to really make sure that the reflections and the Fresnels were working correctly. Obviously, the reflections changed dramatically depending on the time of day. We're rendering everything in RenderMan and we have our core shader library, so every metal shader is made of in-house shading components with different specular models and others."
Meanwhile, the digital doubles posed an interesting challenge because the sequence is a mixture of second unit photography in Arizona with stunt doubles. And for shots where you see the actors in close-up, it was shot on a greenscreen in Atlanta with a partial set train.

"So we either had to do a face replacement for every stunt done in the desert or add the digital actors in the vehicles," Rocheron suggests. "Originally, we thought we could get away with 2D face replacement solutions, but very quickly we realized that some of the shapes of the stunt double's heads were very different or the hairlines didn't match. And because the vehicles are moving a lot into the environment, the lighting changes quite a bit.

The practical cliff was replaced by one that looked more like a desert canyon, and CG doubles.

"So we decided to build full-on 3D digital doubles and roto'd in all the actors and vehicles and put our digital actors in there and we traced the head with a 3D version of it. There was even one shot where we had great second unit footage of a fight with Paul Walker on the truck, and they really wanted to keep the shot so we had to replace the stunt double's face, which filled two-thirds of the screen.
"The other challenge was to marry the greenscreen photography with the desert photography. What production did was shoot tialed backgrounds in the desert with three different cameras at different speeds, at different angles, on different locations, at different distances from the trucks. We could then stitch that footage and create some environment bubbles in Nuke, which we could basically apply on the greenscreen footage. We would get forced perspective and dust from the desert and we really could match the environments as seamlessly as possible."
And, of course, when Diesel and Walker do the jump in the canyon with the Corvette, it's a mix of real stunt work and CG replacement and enhancement. "The stunt was used actually for having a practical hit in the water and practical splashes with the car and the guys," he adds. "We took off the practical cliff that was 50-feet-high and replaced it with one that was 300-feet and it looked more like a desert type of canyon.
"There's a bridge in the sequence, which is also digital. Nobody would really build a bridge like this with those sheets of concrete footing, but we used different references that we patched together that work well for the section that fits onto the desert as well as the section that fits above the canyon itself.

Engine Room makes a splash with Soul Surfer

2011-04-25T23:34:00.001-07:00

In 2003, Hawaiian teen surfing star Bethany Hamilton lost her left arm to a shark attack. The story of her return to professional competition is now the subject of Soul Surfer, with actress AnnaSophia Robb playing Hamilton. To create scenes of Robb’s missing arm – around 500 shots – and other effects in the film, director Sean McNamara turned to LA-based visual effects house Engine Room. We talk to the studio’s founder and the film’s vfx supe Dan Schmit.
fxg: Five hundred arm removal shots seems pretty daunting. What were some of the ways you thought you would approach these, at least initially?
Schmit: When we first went into it, the assumption I think from the producers was that it was going to be all digital. It’d be essentially putting the stump on and creating that for every shot. It didn’t take long for us to play around and discover that a really good option was to work with an actual prosthetic in combination with the digital work. So AnnaSophia would often hold her arm behind her back and her shoulder would be pushed back, so we could put a little prosthetic in the front that looked like it was sitting in a normal position.

Before and after images of Engine Room's arm removal VFX

Schmit: Well first we actually did a screen test. We worked with a great make-up and effects guy, Mark Garbarino, to develop the prosthetic. We did a 35mm film shoot with John Leonetti, the DP, and with Sean the director of a body double with a green covered arm running around on the beach and jumping in the water. We brought that back to Engine Room to start working with it and develop our techniques, for (a) getting the green off the background and (b) how do we reconstruct the parts of her body once the stump is taken away? In the end we took those methods into our production.
fxg: So once you got to the shoot, can you describe a typical shoot set-up?
Schmit: The day would begin for AnnaSophia in the make-up chair having the prosthetic applied, which was about an hour and a half process. Mark would be there on set and would essentially cast a new silicone prosthetic for her every day. We had three different looks for the prosthetic because the stump changed through the movie as time goes on. At first, it’s got a bandage on it, then that comes off and the scar is really fresh and the arm swollen. Then for the later scenes in the movie, which are six months down the track, the stump is more toned and tanned. So we had that kind of continuity to keep track of. AnnaSophia wore either a green neoprene sock or we would paint on chromakey waterproof green paint that Mark developed.
fxg: How did you shoot the green arm scenes?
Schmit: We went in with a plan of saying, ‘We’re going to have, say, just three green arm shots in this particular scene,’ but as soon as we got into the movie we realized that the visual effects needs were never going to be the deciding factor in any scene. Whatever was shot was shot and we were going to have to deal with it. We talked about lots of close-ups and lots of lock-offs, but of course every shot was moving and lots of shots showing different angles. For every set-up we would have her perform and either myself or Michael Caplan, our visual effects producer, would be on set in Hawaii doing on-set supervision.
fxg: So what kind of specific challenges did having to remove the green arm and prosthetic bring?
Schmit: Well, the prosthetic was designed for AnnaSophia’s arm to be behind her back, but that was not always practical. We had to decide on a shot by shot basis what made the most sense. We couldn’t have where she was putting her arm inhibit her performance in any way. So often her arm was hanging right there in front of her and we would have to resolve that by reconstructing the whole side of her body.
One of the excellent techniques we developed to be able to do that was shooting an additional plate of the side of AnnaSophia’s body. After the end of every set-up we would have her raise her arm up and just rotate her torso around a little bit while the camera was still rolling, so we could see what her body looked like without her arm covering it. We just needed a few frames of that. We would also shoot a clean background.
fxg: How did split the work up back at Engine Room?
Schmit: The first thing was that we decided to split the work up amongst artists here and around the world. We abandoned the artist-based facility model several years ago at Engine Room. In our early years, we’d have 20 or 30 artists in-house. But we’ve realized it’s better for us to have a very high-end small team in-house and work with a lot of off-site people. So we had six in-house ‘rock star’ generalists, and about 18 off-site who were anywhere from across town to across the world. Most shots were done by a single artist or a very small team, and that lent itself well for being easily divisible.
fxg: Can you take me through how a typical green arm replacement shot was done, say for a surfing scene?
Schmit: We had some nice techniques for the water work. We discovered that if we were moving a green arm over a moving water background, rather than trying to patch water in from another part of the shot or a plate, we found we could do a lot of with stretching. We’d take the water that was next to the green arm and horizontally stretch it to create a clean background and fill in the areas behind the arm. We found that technique worked well for the sand beaches behind her as well. There was just something about the sand texture that meant you couldn’t tell it was being stretched as well.
We had figured that out in testing, so when we were shooting, we asked the water camera teams – some of the best surfing cinematographers in the world – that whenever they were framing a shot that had the surfer’s green arm on, we would ask them to please frame the shot so there would be a little extra space, so there would be something there for us to stretch.
fxg: How did you co-ordinate that work, given that it was going on in so many different places?
Schmit: We came up with an interesting analogue way of unifying the look. Initially we were getting a lot of good shots back, and each looked great, but they were all slightly different in terms of resolving some of the areas that the stump looked like from behind, for instance. We realized we needed to define for everybody what it needed to look like by coming up with a clear reference.
For that we started with a 3D model from a body scan of AnnaSophia – which was taken with her arm behind her back and the prosthetic on – and basically removed her stump and making a clean stump model in 3D in Maya. Then we had a 3D object print made as a polymer cast. The print was of Sofia’s shoulder and the stump and her arm gone, in life size. We then took that piece and gave it to Mark Garbarino and he cast it and made it out of silicone. It was painted in the same way he made it up on the set every day, but now it was complete. It was the stump from all sides.
So now we had this prop, and what we ended up doing was setting up a little photo studio at our place and then for any particular shot where we needed to see what the stump was going to look like from a particular angle, we did a little series of stills on a turntable. We’d light it to look like the lighting of the scene and then shoot a series of stills for the compositor. It could be 50 stills of the stump from all different angles, but as a photographic element. Then a lot of the work was done using those stills – morphing, time re-mapping them altogether into a seamless composite. It worked really well and allowed us to control the look of it and answer questions very quickly.
fxg: What was your toolset for the arm replacement work?
Schmit: All of our compositing and painting work was done in CS4 at Engine Room, but offsite it was a real combination of Flame, Nuke, Fusion. We also did some 3D work in Maya.
fxg: Can you talk about some of the other effects work you had to do for the film? Were there some face replacements for the surfing scenes?
Schmit: Yes, so there were three competition scenes in the movie, so three times you have these scenes where you’ve got six girls in the water, each with their own rashguards, surfboards, and the water unit – all the underwater camera guys with hydroflex camera housings, sound guys in inner tubes. And ADs with walkie talkies in zip-lock bags, floating around on little dingys.
And a lot of the surfing scenes were rewritten in the editing room with the material that had been shot. Part of that meant stealing shots from different competition scenes. The only problem was in say that scene the surfer was going left to right instead of right to left, and the surfboard’s blue instead of red, and the rashguard’s green instead of blue and it’s the wrong girl!
So we found ourselves doing a lot of shots like that where we were painting surfers out of the water or painting people in the water that needed to be there for continuity. It involved changing just about every aspect of the surfers from their bathing suit, to whether they were goofy foot or regular, and their faces. We had the most success using photographic elements we had shot of AnnaSophia against greenscreen, rather than anything from the 3D body scan.
fxg: What would have been the most challenging shot or shots in the film?
Schmit: Some of the arm replacement shots were very difficult, because AnnaSophia’s green arm was facing camera for a long, long time. But there were also some tricky shots that were surfing face replacement shots, and what was particularly interesting with these was that the real Bethany Hamilton did a lot of surfing in the film. Well, Bethany is now 21 or 22 years old and is basically an Olympic athlete, and AnnaSophia is 15.
So early on we were a bit weary of doing a face replacement on Bethany’s body because the scales of their bodies were very different. That was a real concern, but as the movie progressed and all the surfing footage was analyzed it was determined that the surfing that Bethany had done was the best, so it was just assumed we would figure it out! And we able to do some pretty impressive scaling in compositing to make those shots work.

Mr. X’s spy effects for Hanna

2011-04-21T22:39:00.000-07:00

Joe Wright’s coming-of-age espionage thriller, Hanna, tells the story of a 16-year-old girl who has grown up in the Finnish wilderness and is now being pursued by the CIA. Mr. X Inc, the film’s sole visual effects vendor, completed around 200 shots for the film, and presented VFX sup. Brendan Taylor with the chance to collaborate closely with the director, production designer, DoP, stunt crew and other filmmakers on key sequences.

Original plate

Final composite

For Mr. X, production on Hanna moved swiftly. “We got the script in January of 2010, I think on a Wednesday,” recalls Taylor. “By Monday I was in Hamburg for a location scout!” At first glance, the studio’s shots seemed to be limited to driving composites, snow enhancements, muzzle flashes and gore enhancements. But after scouting the locations, it became clear to Taylor that Mr. X’s responsibilities were going to be much larger. “Hanna needed to go to all these locations across Europe,” he says, “and it needed to feel like a $100 million movie, but we had to do it at less than a third of the price.”
Production began shooting in March 2010 in northern Finland, an area that posed minus 35 degrees centigrade weather. The location shoot, however, was deemed important by the director, working with production designer Sarah Greenwood and DoP Alwin Kuchler, and Taylor, to show the harsh environment Hanna had been raised to survive in. It would also mean that digital additions of snow would be kept to a minimum. Additional scenes were filmed in Bavaria, Germany using masses of physical fake snow created using paper and water, with only minor digital touch-ups required. The same was essentially true for all of the film’s locations and sets. “It was really important to enhance the cinematographer’s and the production designer’s work,” remarks Taylor. “We hear that a lot from cinematographers and production designers – that when it gets into the visual effects realm, the images take on a whole life of their own. But because they did such a wonderful job, we just wanted to complement what they did.”

“for the reindeer… they are not very bright animals…we had considered going with a Steve Martin appliance”

Brendan Taylor

VFX Sup.

An early scene in Finland involves Hanna utilizing her archery skills to kill a reindeer, a sequence ultimately accomplished with a real animal and digital arrows. “I had never worked with reindeer before,” notes Taylor, “but they are not very bright animals. We had considered going with a ‘Steve Martin appliance’ (a reference to a 1970s Steve Martin arrow-through-the-head gag) but it was minus 35 at the time and there was no point in getting this giant arrow stuck onto the side of a big reindeer, who in the first place wasn’t doing what it was told. So we decided to do the arrow digitally, and concentrate on the performance of the reindeer on location.”

Shooting on a frozen lake. Photo by Brendan Taylor.

Mr. X also created a digital C-130 Hercules plane that flies over the snow-covered trees and Hanna’s head in another Finland scene. The plate for the shot, a low crane looking up at the actress as she follows the plane, was acquired on the first day of shooting. “It was actually a little nerve-wracking,” recalls Taylor. “Joe hasn’t really done that many visual effects films before and we hadn’t previs’d the shot, so we had to figure out how fast the airplane would be going over. Everyone’s nervous on the first day. But I was amazed at how quickly we got into a groove of being able to discuss the particulars of the shot. It’s the kind of collaboration that you really dream of.”
Further visual effects work for scenes in Finland by Mr. X also remained of the seamless variety. “There was a fight scene out on a frozen lake in the middle of nowhere and it needed to have pristine snow,” says Taylor. “But after you shoot the scene a number of times, say five takes, all the snow is trampled. They were shooting it very frenetically and hand-held, but I just said keep shooting and we’ll roto the people and smooth out the snow. In the end it was just done by compositing still photographs onto the snow and by using a variety of clean plates.”

Left to Right: Tim Dean (Libra Head Technician), Jorg Widmer ("A" Camera Operator) and Alwin Kuchler (Director of Photography) discuss the C-130 shot. Photo by Brendan Taylor.

That work, and the majority of location visual effects, was completed without the aid of detailed survey data or tracking markers. “In Finland we were only 60km from the Arctic Circle and another five kilometers to the border of Russia,” says Taylor. “So getting survey equipment up there wasn’t really practical or worth the cost. I debated whether or not to put tracking markers on the ground, but you don’t want to get into a situation where you’ve put all these great tracking markers down and then three quarters of your shots are removing those markers! It just meant we had to track to the shadow or footprint on the snow, and it really brought our shot count down.”
At one point in the film, Hanna is captured and taken to a bunker underneath the Moroccan desert. The underground scenes were filmed at the now disused Berlin Windkanal, a cavernous aerodynamic testing wind tunnel built for German aircraft after the First World War. Hanna escapes her holding cell and is pursued down the hallway before narrowly sliding to freedom under a giant closing steel door.

Original plate

Final shot

“The giant steel door didn’t exist in the wind tunnel, nor did the holding cell and area around it,” says Taylor. “So the art department built that area and we had Hanna run on the practical ground and then we digitally extended the entire tunnel around her. We ended up replacing the tunnel for continuity reasons. As well, we had two full-CG shots, and her POV down the tunnel as the door is closing.”
Chris MacLean modeled and lit the created environment, which was rendered in V-Ray, with compositing by Robert Greb and Greg Astles to match the location based on reference photos taken by Taylor. “Those shots were real monsters and took a long time and finessing to get them done,” he says. “I guess the most difficult thing about them was getting the texture and the material on the wall to feel like concrete. For a while, it just wasn’t reacting correctly and we wanted to match what Sarah had done with her production design and what Alwin had done – he had lit the environment with strobe lights and matching the intensity of those was a challenge.”
For a hotel room scene in which one of the characters, Lewis (John MacMillan), is killed, Taylor relied on some innovative on-set collaboration with the director and stunt coordinators in particular to help with the staging of a long stunt shot. Lewis walks down a large hotel room to talk to intelligence operative Marissa (Cate Blanchett), then hears a knock at the door, turns around, walks to the door, puts his eye up to the peep hole, before being suddenly shot and blown backwards.
The shot was conceived as a one take with the actual actor and not a stunt double, and without the benefit of a face replacement, since MacMillian had to deliver a line of dialogue and walk the length of the room before being violently killed. “Because he gets yanked back so hard,” says Taylor, “we needed to have him on a rig and I was really concerned that he walks all this way down and turns around and then you’ve got this stunt wire crossing in front of his blazer as it moves. I just didn’t want to get into the whole scenario of digitally re-creating his blazer or one of those monster paint outs that takes months.”

Above: Original plate (L) and final shot.
“So what we ended up doing,” continues Taylor, “was having the actor come down to camera and talk to Marissa with this pick point in his back. As he’s talking to Cate Blanchett we had a guy dressed in green crawl along the ground and meet him right where he gets hit, clip him in the back and then he gets yanked almost immediately. It was one of those shots where a little bit of shot design went a long way. Working with Joe and the stunt guys – over dinner actually – we were able to come up with a pretty effective solution.”
To help the assembly process, Mr. X also supplied editor Paul Tothill with an early effects shot to remove the comedic presence of the greenscreened person. “It was a very emotional scene, and Paul couldn’t cut it without cracking up,” laughs Taylor. “We needed to get Paul an effects shot without the extra guy in there, so we basically spent a day doing ‘green man removal’.”

Original container park plate

Final shot

Similar innovation was required for a scene towards the end of the film of a fist fight between Erik (Eric Bana) and Isaacs (Tom Hollander). “They shot the entire fight at 48 frames per second,” explains Taylor, “and I never would have known this, but a lot of the success in fake movie punches relies on shooting at 24 frames. When you start to slow it down, you really see the punches missing. Some of them looked fantastic but others you could feel were just a little bit too far away from the face. So what we ended up doing there was a completely 2D solution.”
Compositor Barb Benoit worked on the Flame to rotoscope the actor being hit and move them a little closer to the person delivering the punches. “We’d start with that, but it still wouldn’t feel like the punch was connecting,” says Taylor. “So in addition, Barb would do a subtle time warp just before the punch was connecting to slow it down. Then as the punch connects she’d speed it up. It doesn’t feel like a music video crazy-slow-then-fast time warp. It actually really makes the punch feel like it’s connecting. Just watching them sometimes in dailies we would go, “Oh, man!”. We only had to do that two or three times, but I was just really impressed with Barb’s wizardry for those shots.”
Mr. X carried out wire removals and set extensions for a scene in which Hanna is pursued by Isaacs’ henchmen atop several shipping containers. “This was beautifully choreographed by Jeff Imada,” says Taylor. “All of the scary as hell looking stuff is Saoirse! For our set extensions, it was really important to feel the damp murkiness of a cold Hamburg night. Matte painter Milan Schere handled that rather obscure direction perfectly.”
Other visual effects work by Mr. X included several matte paintings to help sell the multiple locations Hanna visits during the film. “In the movie, Hanna travels all through Europe but there wasn’t really the budget to do that for real,” says Taylor. “There’s one shot where they’re in a van driving through the desert. We shot the van in Morocco and then flew to Spain and took digital stills and some HD video on a Canon 5D. We created a digital matte painting and composited it into the plate and it looks really wonderful. That was Greg Astles again and Matt Schofield.”
For Taylor, some of the biggest – and most fun – challenges on Hanna included traveling to several countries and then ultimately dealing with 200 varying shots of differing complexities, some as one-offs, and working with an edit that remained in flux until near the end of production. The close interaction with the other creatives on the film, however, made it an incredibly enjoyable experience for the visual effects supervisor.

Above: Original plate (L) and final shot.
“The one thing that was really different about this film,” says Taylor, “was that the whole way through it really felt like a family. People were really looking out for each other and trying to find the best solution for the movie. I credit a lot of that to Joe. He was a real leader – we would get our shot lists in the morning and there would be a little inspirational note or a line from the movie just to keep everyone going. It helps you get through the freezing cold Hamburg night or being up at 3am in the morning at a container park, or the freezing cold Finland day!”

Your Highness: A little bit of Framestore magic

2011-04-20T11:28:00.000-07:00

Your Highness is the medieval tale of two princes, brothers Thadeous and Fabious, and their attempt to rescue the later’s future bride, Belladonna, who has been kidnapped by the evil wizard Leezar. Joined by aide Courtney and warrior Isabel, the group encounter wizards, savages and strange creatures on their quest.
Framestore completed around 570 shots for the film, including a five-headed serpent, a flying mechanical bird, matte paintings, set extensions and much magic. In this interview with fxguide, Framestore co-founder and the film’s visual effects supervisor Mike McGee delves into how he collaborated closely with the Your Highness filmmakers on both a creative and technical level, and on unexpected CG solutions.
The VFX News: Can you tell me about how you got involved on the film?
Mike McGee: Danny McBride, who is both a writer on the film and the actor playing Thadeous, and the director, David Gordon Green, came over to Framestore to go through the script, but they said in advance if we had any ideas to throw them into the mix. So I talked through the script and discussed how we could achieve what was already in there, and as we were talking, I was then offering up moments where visual effects could add some real production value and put dollars on the screen.
The VFX News: You then took on the role of the overall visual effects supervisor. What did that involve initially?
McGee: Well, we filmed in Belfast for four months in the Summer of ’09. I went out a month and a half before filming so that I could be there for the whole pre-production process. I became involved in how much of the set we would build, how much would be topped up in CG, the locations where matte paintings could help to provide bigger vistas, and the bigger creature sequences in terms of what we could do practically and digitally.
The VFX News: How did you contribute to say the serpent creature sequence?
McGee: When I was first there, we had sequence where a creature would burst out of another body and it would be half human, half alien. But we decided there was something more we could do to make that scene have more production value. So they asked if I could come up with an idea for an alternative creature. So I sat down with the writer, the director and the production designer and this image popped into my head of a five-headed creature. I thought we could build one CG creature and multiply it five times. As I made the shape with my arm, I rested my elbow on the table and made my hand into the five heads. Everybody said, ‘That’s great – we’ll do a hand serpent!’ Then the writer said we could make it like a video game where the bad guys control the creature by putting his hand into a bowl of sick.
So this big bucket of sick became the game’s controller and this guy punches his fist into this bowl of yellow-looking sick, and as he moves his hand around inside the bucket, this monster bursts out of this arena out of the ground. And then this fight ensues. Our heroes pull out swords and then through various jumps and leaps they slice one by the one the heads off the creature. Each time they slice a head off, the guy loses one of his fingers in the bowl of sick. At the end of the shot, he pulls his hand out of the sick and he’s just left with his bird finger. It was quite bizarre movie-making!
The VFX News: That sounds great that as the VFX supe you were able to have that kind of contribution.
McGee: Actually after the idea of the hand serpent, the guys were like ‘This is great, you’re ideas are great – let’s keep collaborating,’ and I’d be invited to meetings about other parts of the script. It was really the most collaborative film I’ve ever worked on. At Framestore, we now have our own art department that works on projects, but we’ve also worked on films, even if we’re not doing the visual effects on those films. We designed the hand serpent and did all the concepts in-house to show the director what it would look like, but still worked closely with the production designer.
The VFX News: Was that serpent sequence something you also ‘boarded and previs’d?
McGee: We did all our own previs. Before that, the director actually said, ‘Go away, here’s the storyboard artist, you block this out and show it to me when you think you’ve got a good sequence’. So I briefed the storyboard artist, and then the director had a look and made a few changes. Then the storyboard artist went back to Framestore to get everything previs’d and the director then signed off on the previs. When we went to the set, we pretty much shot to the previs. We might change the lens occasionally. It involved a lot of stunts as well, so things changed when we realised what we could do – the stunt people were offering up some amazing new ideas.
The VFX News: How were those serpent scenes shot?
McGee: Before each set up, I would go to the individual actors, whether it was Natalie Portman playing Isabel or James Franco as Fabious, and say, ‘There’s the creature, there’s the guy with a fishing pole and that’s where the eyeline is for head number four – you’ll be chopping that off and then we’ll move to position number two where you’ll be attacked by head number one’. We had a fishing rod for rehearsals but then when we shot the scene they did filmed it with just the actors. If we needed to do stunts, we’d have to rig a jerk wire, then we’d bring in the stunt person. Natalie Portman had a big action sequence and she would run in and then we’d cut to a stunt double on a trampette so she could fire up into the air and do several somersaults before she came down.
fxg: The VFX News:- This is a comedy and it’s set in medieval times, but there are a lot of effects in the film. Did that mean you approached it any differently to other projects?
McGee: Well as you say the fact is that it’s a ‘medieval stoner comedy’ – which was the way we referred to it – with comedy being the key emphasis. If we were on set and something funny happened, then we would go with it. For example, we did a sequence with some magical CG fairies. There was a scripted scene that was two or three pages, and we were shooting this exterior nighttime scene, and they were struggling to make the scene funny, so David had some alternative lines written down and would then would encourage them to ad lib – quite often to the limit of what would be acceptable.
The VFX had to be able to follow that ad lib path. In one of the sequences, the guy caught a fairy that was fluttering around a pond. At first you think they’re fireflies and so he grabs it very gently. And then we go in for a close-up and he starts to pull the wings off this creature and it starts squirming in his hand. And then he rips the head off and then takes the body and crushes it in his hand and snorts it through a pipe. It’s meant to be a magic fairy and so he’s snorting magic dust which he gets high on. The shots changed from the storyboard because the way he acted it out was just very funny on the day, so we went with a different method. Although we weren’t really doing groundbreaking things from a CG point of view, the way we were capturing data and keeping up with the improvisation was one of the most challenging things. You don’t want to stop the flow of the comedy – it’s funniest when it keeps going and going and having the camera keep rolling. You can’t get your camera passes until the scene is finished, so we would normally wait until the end of a roll and then jump in and grab what we could.
The VFX News: What were some of the other major sequences Framestore worked on, the bird Simon for example?
McGee: The director wanted to pay homage to early fantasy sci-fi films and the original Harryhausen Clash of the Titans film. So on set they had an animatronic bird which was something the actors could perform with, and is the bird in many of the shots. But whenever that bird had to take off or fly or carry messages or help out in any of the action fight sequences, it had to be CG.
The VFX News: There’s a lot of magic in the film too – how was that created and what approach did you take to the electricity effect?
McGee: Well there are a lot of wizards that fire magic as a weapon. And the magic comes out in the shape of electricity from a staff or the palms of hands. The director wanted this to be an homage to magic from the past, so he didn’t want the effects to be super-glossy and Harry Potter-style. He wanted it to be a little more man-made, but still look like a modern visual effect. So we came up with this magic that fires from people’s hands and then we have a big action sequence at the end, where the wizard has taken his virgin bride that he has reared from a child, which he is going to impregnate with dragon seed – and then she’ll give birth to this dragon which he will then control and rule the kingdom. He has to impregnate her at the time of twin moons. When they eclipse he is able to impregnate her, so the film is moving to this climax of the twin moons. The ceiling of the observatory opens up to let the moonlight in and the moonlight sends down electricity which puts a forcefield around the bed that he’s strapped this virgin to.
The whole end sequence has magic everywhere coming off people’s hands, the walls, then there’s dust clouds and explosions. There’s lighting coming down though a crystal on the roof, focussing down on the bed that the virgin is lying on. And finally when the bad guy is killed in the climax of the film, his body disintegrates in a shower of embers and all these embers are sucked up by the electricity and a huge explosion happens that sends it up to the twin moons. So there we have a CG castle, with CG set extensions, magic effects which were particle renders heavily treated in 2D.
The VFX News: Were there any other shots in particular you wanted to talk about?
McGee: Well, there’s one sequence in a labyrinth where they have to go to collect a magical sword – a unicorn blade with a unicorn horn and it’s the only sword that can kill the bad guy. When they go into this labyrinth, the sword is protected by a minotaur – half bull and half man. It’s a guy in a suit in hooves, standing upright with a bull’s head. He chases our heroes around the labyrinth trying to protect the sword. At one point he manages to grab one of our heroes and pushes him against a wall and starts to dry hump him against the wall. So you’ve got this very funny sequence of this guy being worked on behind by this minotaur.
Basically, the minotaur in this rubber suit had an eight to ten inch flaccid penis as part of his costume. So whenever you see him running around, he has this penis that’s hanging down. But when he’s dry humping our guy, Natalie Portman runs around the corner and catches him. To distract him, she pulls some Peruvian pipes out of her pocket and plays these pipes and calms the creature down to distract him. As he turns to face us, the client said, ‘Hey, there’s something missing here guys – there’s no excitement on this minotaur!’.
So, we had to build in CG a fully erect minotaur’s penis, make a turntable, texture it and send it back for approval – which was the funny thing. We then had to paint out the existing flaccid penis, body track the erect one on. We did all that and then they said, ‘You know what guys, because Natalie is playing the pipes, that penis needs to animate from full excitement to semi-droop’. So we then got into conversations on how this penis is going to animate, and we then had to put an animator on it to make it go from erect to slightly droopy for the five seconds that shot lasts. So that was probably my most bizarre show and tell in how we made a 3D penis and how shiny it is and the surface scatter lighting on it.
The VFX News: I’m guessing you won’t be talking about that at Siggraph, then.
McGee: [Laughs]. People are always saying, ‘Can you do something we’ve never seen before?’ to visual effects artists. Well, I can honestly say with this movie I have done so many things that I’ll probably never do again!

Shining a Light on Bakery Relight

2011-04-19T22:12:00.000-07:00

At last, a lighting tool specifically designed for artists in animation and VFX.

Visual development for the movie Ana. Courtesy of Lo Coloco.

One of the noteworthy launches this week at the 2011 NAB Show in Vegas is Bakery Relight, the industry's first interactive, all-in-one lighting and rendering suite of tools, from the French-based software firm, The Bakery, co-owned by Erwan Maigret and Arnauld Lamorlette (who received a 2011 Technical Achievement Academy Award for co-developing a global illumination solution).
Several years in development, Relight is touted as a technical solution to support the progressive and iterative process of lighters and shaders (a refinement properties and details) with resolution feedback within seconds. The proprietary tool set also enables superior matching of CG illumination with composited live-action elements, which makes it useful for both animation and VFX.
The brainchild of Maigret (a technical lead on Shrek the Third, Shrek 2 and Madagascar) and Lamorlette (head of FX on Shrek the Third and Shrek 2), Relight, solves an important industry need. "Arnauld and I both have artistic and technical backgrounds and understand the artists' needs, and we wanted to build a company that focuses on technology that every studio can use," Maigret suggests. "Relight introduces new artistic possibilities: it solves the lighting and rendering bottleneck found at nearly all studios.
"If you look at Pixar and DreamWorks, they have the time and the money and the technologies to be able to afford to work on the image. That is exactly what we are doing because there is no such thing on the market. Basically, the process is to work on the final image -- to change the color -- just like a painter.

More visual development from Ana. Courtesy of Lo Coloco.

"We talked to artists at studios and found out that interactive lighting was their biggest need because animation is about spending artists' time; rendering is about how much time it's going to take and what you can handle. And we decided to deliver this kind of software to market so that it can be used by many people and cut down on the time in the render farm and let artists do lighting that won't take hours. Our research tells us that companies that use Relight can improve turnaround times by up to 300%."

Templar project, courtesy of Dwarf Labs.

Relight is designed for both stereoscopic 3-D and flat productions and it's customized and optimized for a lighter's workflow. According to Maigret, when a lighter changes a parameter, only the strict minimum is recomputed. The results of complex computations are saved to disk so they need not be recomputed. Thus, the big technological advancement "is about the caching that we do: instead of doing very fast computations, going 100x faster like the GPU, we just do 1% of the computing and reuse it all the time."
That's because of a multithreaded implementation of state-of-the-art rendering algorithms, combined with a unique caching mechanism. Relight is comprised of an interactive lighting application, a rendering engine and a set of auxiliary tools, which include command line for batch processing. Interactive for visualizing the data generated at each step of the rendering process and conversion from third party formats (image, geometry, scene description).
The rendering engine is built around an open node-based architecture for shader definitions. The pool of shaders is extensible by design, so it is easy to add new lights, materials or any other shading operators. The engine architecture then allows for a highly customizable, yet seamless mix of different illumination and shading models in the same scene.
"Imagine you have to light a character with millions of hairs," Maigret continues. "When you need to change the color or shading of the hair, the new image is recomputed interactively. The geometric computations for the hair have already been performed. The same paradigm applies to material shading, global illumination, ray tracing, texturing and shadows. Lighters can choose to either increase their productivity or tweak their lighting to improve quality. Most of the time they can do both."
The development cycle of Relight is organized as a constant back-and-forth between development of new features and testing in production environment, to ensure a perfect balance between usability and performance.

Who's the Cat project, courtesy of Dwarf Labs.

VFX of Source Code

2011-04-11T09:01:00.000-07:00

Modus handled pyrotechnics along with digital environments. Courtesy of Summit Ent.

Duncan Jones follows up his brilliant Moon debut with Source Code, a sci-fi thriller with Ground Hog Day overtones starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a soldier investigating a commuter train explosion by revisiting the incident in a continual eight-minute loop.
Louis Morin, the overall visual effects supervisor, hired six facilities to create more than 850 shots: Montreal-based Modus FX, the primary vendor, which contributed nearly 100 shots in-house, including complex digital crowds, CG trains, environments and dramatic pyrotechnics, and another 60 train station assets for the other vendors; Rodeo FX, which crafted most of the greenscreen windows for the train interiors; MPC Vancouver, which handled the big explosions and crash sequences; Fly Studio, which provided key transitions; Mr. X, which did additional window backgrounds; and Oblique FX, which created bomb interiors, a virtual stuntman and a slow-motion explosion sequence.
Seamless photorealism was vital. The shots featured hundreds of greenscreen windows showing passing landscapes or train station backdrops, and the use of CG in post allowed Jones and the actors to work without outside distractions during production. Set extensions on the train station were also crucial, especially since they decided to change the parking lot. That meant more than 65 additional shots, but these also provided logistical maneuverability as well as flexibility with the storytelling. Editorial, meanwhile, was done in tandem with VFX, allowing them to be ahead of the curve, so to speak.
Modus, which previously worked with Morin on Barney's Version, began early on Source Code. "We started doing the previs for the main action scenes --how the train would explode, and where this would take place -- so we were responsible for the feel and pacing of the key effects sequence," explains Yanick Wilisky, VP of production and vfx supervisor at Modus.
Lens distortion and reflections proved challenging.

However, once these shots were roughed out, Wilisky says they were handed over to MPC Vancouver for completion because Morin wanted a more experienced touch. Thus, Modus was able to do what it does best, focusing on exteriors of the train and the station, including reflective windows and the metallic surfaces of the train. Modus also created the CG commuter and cargo train models for the team at MPC, as well as shots depicting enormous traffic jams: lots of virtual crowds and cars for plates of the superhighway in Chicago, which were shot from a helicopter.
"The action takes place in Chicago but lots of it was filmed in Montreal, so we had to do CG replacements of the environments," Wilisky continues. "So we did a mix of Google Maps and other stuff to survey the area and then we went and took lots of pictures and from there we created an accident. And Duncan would say, 'Let's try another area of Chicago.' So we did three different areas until we figured out exactly the action. At the time we were working with Paul Hirsch, the editor, and he was working with us on a lot of versioning. And the final result is 1:1 with what we prevised.

"There was a real train station built in Montreal, but there were missing pieces, including the roof. And there was an empty field surrounding it, so we had to replace it with CG cars and CG parking and the city of Chicago way in the distance. We designed the whole suburb where the action takes place because Glenbrook in the film doesn't really exist so we had to rework and redesign completely. We imagined it being eight miles from downtown Chicago, and we knew the sun was facing northeast so we did it all accurately and up to scale.
"Everything in the train station is CG except for the door step. You don't want to throw the viewer off if they notice something that doesn't look right. For the movie to work, it had to be as transparent as possible. That was the biggest challenge. The other challenge involves the mayhem. The train is about to crash and everyone is running out of the city, so there's lots of traffic and people running around so we had to use Massive isolation for crowd and car behavior. And for the CG parking, everyone has a sense of what it should look like. We even looked at the existing vegetation in Chicago to make sure that it matched in the area that we were in."
The entire train station environment was appropriately Chicago-fied.

In terms of other tools, Modus used Softimage, Houdini, 3D Equalizer, Nuke and mental ray.
Lens distortion proved to be a challenge in matching CG elements with plates. So, to make sure the distortion values were identical, Modus used 3DEqualizer in concert with a special plug-in from La Maison.
In addition, so Modus had to create reflections and shadows of the station and the characters to mirror the movements of the train and the actors in the CG environment.
"We created three techniques," Wilisky explains. "One was a full CG character, such as Jake, that we used as a reflection; the second was a reflection pasted onto surfaces from different angles; and the third was a basic texture applied to a surface of people moving back and forth. All of them were positioned in space, accordingly, so we could get an accurate reflection of the action. And the compositors not only had the layers of all the different actors but also the scene that was already built to scale accurately with all the geometry. This gave them flexibility to move stuff away or create their own map if needed."
And what does Source Code mean to Modus? "Honestly, this one for us is the first time we were the main vendor for something that's more vfx-driven, unlike The American or Barney's Version," Wilisky concludes.

Stitching Together Sucker Punch

2011-04-11T08:57:00.000-07:00

Ray Harryhausen would be proud of MPC's samurai. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

Yes, there is a method to the madness behind Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch, the mind-bender about trying to escape from an insane asylum through the power of imagination. For her virtual rite of passage, Babydoll (Emily Browning) must defeat three massive samurai, a platoon of German zombies from World War I, a giant dragon and alien robots aboard a bullet train.
And when it came to dividing the four missions and 1,100 vfx shots, John DJ DesJardin, the overall visual effects supervisor, called on MPC Vancouver to tackle the Samurai sequence, Pixomondo to handle the World War I sequence, Animal Logic to create the Dragon sequence and Prime Focus to do the Bullet Train sequence.
"We extended what we learned from Watchmen as far as how we handled our digital characters and capturing shots on set and making the fights work right," confirms DesJardin. "It was a great chance for Zack, his long-time stunt coordinator Damon [Caro] and me to work closely.
"Damon and I came up with this idea called techvis with MPC. Zack could do action during rehearsal and we could quickly turn that into previs from what we captured with Damon and then we'd put that into our environment (a bullet train, a pagoda or a courtyard) and then Zack could set cameras in there. Then Zack would cut his scene before we even shot it in editorial, and Damon and I could take it apart and make these very complicated camera moves and fight moves that were pretty much maxed out in terms of what you could shoot for real and then identify with a lot of assurance what would be the CG stitching in between. We wanted to capitalize on what's been developed over the past several years to project actual footage onto geometry. We came to the conclusion early on that we could best help the girls in these fights if we took them to their limit and then use the CG to take them just a little further and then snap back into the range of what they could do so they're always grounded in something real."
Stitching together digital doubles with the real actress made the action more seamless and believable.

Thus, it was in the creative stitching from digital double to live actor that really made the action smooth and seamless. This came out of two months of R&D that DesJardin initiated to deal with the Bullet Train sequence, which then became the axis for the whole movie.
The sequence required Prime Focus (supervised by Bryan Hirota) to develop a CG helicopter and helipad, alien-like terrains, interior and exterior shots of a magnetic levitation train that gets destroyed in a dramatic style, hoards of armed robots, CG doubles for the three actors and a futuristic metropolis called "Bunny City" inspired by Alien. One two-and-a-half minute shot, in particular, required the animation and render of nearly 20 minutes of material so Snyder could "time warp" everything down to the final length.
As for the robots, Snyder wanted a blank mirror face plate but with a little transparency so you could see underneath, where there's a camera system for an eye and other hardware.
Meanwhile, MPC (under the supervision of Guillaume Rocheron) brought the three samurais to life, combining real samurai armor pieces and detail onto the original, very stylized body proportions. Next, they accurately built the Japanese Pagoda and its surrounding environment, based on the original artwork and set plans by production designer Rick Carter and his team so that each section and plank could be destroyed during the final fight against the machine gun samurai.
Pixomondo had ideal Red Baron experience and also created the Meka vehicle.

To handle the destruction work, MPC's software and vfx teams in Vancouver developed a new destruction system called "Kali" based on Pixelux's DMM, a finite elements solver usually used in the video game industry. This new approach allowed materials to flex and bend before breaking and the ability to define physical properties to realistically simulate wood, metal and stone breaking. It also gave the modelers the freedom to create assets without worrying about how they would break, eliminating the time consuming process of pre-cutting the geometry. MPC then implemented a full retiming solution into the pipeline, allowing artists to work on everything at 100fps and apply the final retime at render time to get accurate motion blur and animation interpolation. The compositing team then pieced together hundreds of CG layers for each shot.
Then, for the World War I sequence, in which Babydoll and her fellow inmates battle German storm troopers with steampowered mechanical faces on the battlefield and in the air, climaxing with the destruction of a giant Zeppelin, Pixomondo (under the supervision of Rainer Gombos) built and destroyed all aircraft, including a Meka, a futuristic armored endoskeleton. They used 3ds Max, Vray, Photoshop, Synthese, Nuke, FX Fume, Afterburner, Krakator, Thinking Particles and proprietary software.
"There were many meetings where Zack and Damon and I were talking Heavy Metal," DesJardin recalls, "and how that magazine, in particular, is responsible for a lot of us fanboys just thinking of these hybrid sci-fi/fantasy stories and environments: 'I want to have a WWI sequence where the girls go in and kick German ass. What if I have some zombies? Cool!'
"We knew Pixomondo's work from The Red Baron, so we figured they would be ideal at building the World War I environment and assets. The only thing we did was give them a face lift to give the scene a sci-fi, steampunk vibe. But Pixomondo made the giant Zeppelin. Rainer really tricked that thing out: there's detail that I never even dreamed of. He even pushed the steampunk guys that I asked for out on the strut near the engine to the nth degree."
Fire was a "Snap" for Animal Logic.

For the Dragon sequence, Animal Logic (supervised by Andy Brown) designed and built the entire volcanic environment and a medieval castle. In order to establish the battle between knights and orcs, they used a combination of motion capture, Massive software and hero animation in Softimage. A proprietary tool was written for viewing and animating Massive crowds in Maya that added speed and efficiency. The dragon fire was created using the proprietary "Snap," developed on Snyder's Legend of the Guardians, but on a much larger scale for Sucker Punch. The R&D department also wrote a custom hair sim tool called "Alfro," for its first foray into digital doubles with long hair, when Babydoll hangs suspended from the dragon.
In fact, the dragon was inspired by Dragonslayer, per DesJardin's suggestion."Zack actually liked one of the Harry Potter dragons and we looked at that first," DesJardin explains. "We fine tuned it to make it more like Dragonslayer: immense wings for cool flight, the neck is shorter but the spikes come off the face the same way. We also studied the motion blur that Phil Tippett achieved with his Go-Motion technique. We took that and ran with it because we knew we had to do the flight attack with the airplane."

Making of I Am Number Four

2011-02-25T03:04:00.000-08:00

Making of I Am Number Four

The power of Lumen was achieved with a fresh, organic take on light beams by Hammerhead. All images courtesy of Disney Enterprises Inc.

In I Am Number Four, directed by D. J. Caruso (Disturbia) and produced by Michael Bay (Transformers), nine alien toddlers are sent to earth to escape an invading race bent on destroying their planet. The Mogs track the Loriens on earth but can only kill them in sequence. The focus is on Number Four (Alex Pettyfer), who lives as a teenager in Ohio. Like Superman, he's developed superhuman powers, including enhanced strength, speed, agility and telekinesis.
With nearly 800 vfx shots under the overall supervision of Greg McMurry (G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra), the work was divided between ILM, Entity FX, Hammerhead, Shade and Dive, among others.
"The vfx included demonstrating these powers as well as the large reptilian-type hunting dogs, the Pikens, which belong to the Mogs, and are used to chase down the kids," explains McMurry.
ILM (under the supervision of Bill George) did the creature work, which comprised around 65 shots. There are two species of Piken: the baddies, which McMurry describes as a cross between a giant reptile and a flying squirrel, which are about 8-feet tall, can jump large distances and have webbed wing structures between their arms and legs; and the good-guy Bernie monster, which morphs from a gecko into a beagle before transforming into the canine beast that holds its own against the Piken in saving the alien kids.
"The shooting of plates to put these in a realistic environment was quite a challenge," McMurry relates. "We set out wanting to make sure everything was photographed as naturally as possible; we didn't want all the breakage to be some post-production CG event. So with the help of Peter Chesney, the overall special effects supervisor, we crashed these [heavy objects] called 'bucks' through an actual block wall. And then ILM went in and animated the creature in place of the buck. So it was our goal to have that very gritty, interactive, real stuff. Every scene was staged and shot as if the CG creatures were actually there. We used a lot of motion control for those purposes, to do interactive breakage, when a creature would come across a room and knock something over We wanted ILM to use the least amount of computer-generated interactive elements as possible."

Lumen can be very versatile depending on the mood.

The telekinetic powers were done by Hammerhead, which "designed a special slant of people lifting things and moving things." There is also Number Four's special power of Lumen, the ability to generate light out of his hands and arms, and Hammerhead "did these large, powerful light beams that could do anything from just light up his way at night to burn something like a powerful laser. We tried to maintain an organic and natural aspect to it and not look like something mechanical."
Another effect occurs when the Mogs get killed: they turn to a crusty substance and evaporate called "ashing." Entity FX, under the supervision of Mat Beck, did this effect along with the teleport speed effect for Number Six (Teresa Palmer).

The ashing effect uses 3D characters together with both particle and fluid simulations. Entity FX developed the look and, using the company's in-house software, customized sequences, such as having allies dematerialize more slowly and lyrically for individual shots. Entity FX also provided CG-animated bodies and body parts, energy effects, digital blood, glowing swords, exploding crystals, windshields, face replacements, split screens, greenscreen compositing, rig removal, set cleanup, makeup enhancements and a symbolic night sky.
Lumen is also transferred to other tools and Dive (under the supervision of Ed Mendez) contributed to the effect of the blue glow by combining an enhanced and lengthened motion blur with the original gleam from an LED crystal embedded in a sword. The team then manually tracked both the tip and bottom of this crystal in each shot due to the speed of the blades and the lighting in the shots.

The final battle on the football field required a combination of practical and CG effects.

Dive also used Paint when doing camera projections to aid the larger plate restoration areas; some trickier techniques were used when Number Four dives from a cliff over a waterfall. In this scene, the actor's wires were both behind thin strands of hair and in front of a pool of rippling water making for a tricky paint fix.
In terms of working with director Caruso, he "had very clear ideas of how he wanted the crews and actors to experience the effects sequences, which really assisted us in how we put them together. He wasn't one of these 'let's do it post' guys: he really wanted the actors to play out these sequences, and it gave us the leadership to understand how the practical side of the photography was going to drive our effects sequences.
"The final battle is a very physical one and we worked many nights in a high school football field where this takes place. And that whole scene ends up with an out of this world explosion that was a result of an alien weapon. Of course, here we are at this beautiful high school in Pennsylvania with a brand new football field. And we had to do blow up everything but we couldn't touch anything. We had to use every visual effect and special effect technique available without damaging the football field. We had to do it in pieces and so we shot lots of elements and the spectacular ending in a virtual environment, which ILM also helped with."
As for Bay, he participated heavily in the ultimate modeling and skin textures, and, from McMurry's perspective, "helped us understand what makes animated creatures exciting and answer the needs of the script."
By Bill Desowitz