DREAMWORKS ANIMATIONS’ MEGA MINDS PLOT DESTRUCTION WITH BLAST CODE, AT THE PRESS OF A BUTTON

“As we built the city, we also spent time developing how to break the city into all the demolition.” – Philippe Denis, Visual Effects Supervisor

Superheroes come in all shapes, sizes and colors, and you never know where they may be hiding. You can find several in the hallways of DreamWorks Animation, disguised in blue jeans and T-shirts, silently creating worlds and alter-egos. Here we will introduce two of those superheroes and tell their tale of how they created the latest animated blockbuster, Megamind. And blockbuster it is, not just at the box office, but on the screen, with busted blocks flying everywhere.

MEGA DESTRUCTION

Building the city and blowing it up were both major challenges. Denis explained how they tackled the issue of level of detail up front. “We were thinking about creating hero models for certain buildings. We did in some cases, but for the most part it worked so we used the procedural CG buildings for most of the shots, even the very close up buildings.

” The herculean city was built procedurally, taking nine to twelve months to complete. And it still needed to be populated. “We wanted to make sure the city was alive with crowds, and we used Massive to simulate the traffic throughout the city.” They also used Maya, Houdini, the Blast Code plug-in, Nuke for compositing, and DWA’s proprietary software.

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“We thought the renders looked pretty real, but when you put on the glasses, you believe it even more because now you can see both sides of the face at the same time because your eyes are far enough apart to take in that information.” – Guy Williams, VFX Supervisor

James Cameron may be the King of this world but he is the God of Pandora, a paradise planet of suburb transcendental beauty. And the artists of Weta Digital are Cameron’s angels. Of the 162 minutes of film, 117 minutes equaling 1,832 shots was created by Weta’s angels, over 2,000 if you count the omits.

Weta worked on every scene with a Na’vi. The Sci-Fi film is set in the future on the distant planet where humans attempt to mine a mineral whose largest deposit lies under the home of the Na’vi, an indigenous blue humanoid character who is directly linked to the life force of Pandora, and will fight to the death to protect it.

Humans, in an attempt to infiltrate and relocate the Na’vi, develop a DNA hybrid of them and selected humans, and grow Na’vi-like creatures that can be mentally linked and remotely controlled through the DNA-related human mind.

“Once you go into the world of the Avatar,” explained Wayne Stables, one of several VFX Supervisors needed to meet the requirements of this incredible film, “once (main character) Jake Sully and the other humans make this link, pretty much everything in the film becomes computer generated.

A realistic jungle with trees and leaves, with grass with the wind blowing through, with exotic plants that still have to look real, that becomes a huge task. Then add in characters that had to look real, had to be completely believable- you had to read the emotion in their face.

But they are blue. And just in case that hasn’t made your life difficult enough, you decide to do it in stereo. When you consider this is a large planet, rivers and waterfalls or various other complex phenomena, you can start to gauge the scope of digital FX that was required.” And then there is the jungle.

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Humans, in an attempt to infiltrate and relocate the Na’vi, develop a DNA hybrid of them and selected humans, and grow Na’vi-like creatures that can be mentally linked and remotely controlled through the DNA-related human mind. “Once you go into the world of the Avatar,” explained Wayne Stables, one of several VFX Supervisors needed to meet the requirements of this incredible film, “once (main character) Jake Sully and the other humans make this link, pretty much everything in the film becomes computer generated.

A realistic jungle with trees and leaves, with grass with the wind blowing through, with exotic plants that still have to look real, that becomes a huge task. Then add in characters that had to look real, had to be completely believable- you had to read the emotion in their face.

But they are blue. And just in case that hasn’t made your life difficult enough, you decide to do it in stereo. When you consider this is a large planet, rivers and waterfalls or various other complex phenomena, you can start to gauge the scope of digital FX that was required.” And then there is the jungle.

The long-awaited Avatar finally opens today from Twentieth Century Fox and, as you’ve read by now, actually lives up to all the hype about transporting us in a much more visceral and immersive way. I spoke to James Cameron by phone last week from the London junket, and he really enjoyed geeking out for us.

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“Strong concept art will save a lot of steps in the CG process;
it helps to keep the artists from meandering from the final goal.” – Aharon Bourland, Technical Art Director,
Look Development.

As the New Moon rises, so do the stars at Tippett Studio. Charged with creating the Quileute Wolf Pack for the Twilight sequel, some of the industries leading character artists sunk their teeth into just under 60 shots ranging from three to twelve seconds that were pivotal to the storyline. And those shots are getting noticed.

Wolf Mountain and Frankenwolf

The challenge wasn’t just to build a believable wolf, but to build five unique wolves of extraordinary size and weight, to portray that mass often with little more than the surrounding trees as comparisons, create believable fur and humanesque eyes that weren’t distracting. Nate Fredenburg, Art Director, helped to make sure those requirements were fulfilled, combining real-world attributes and CG magic.

“At Tippett Studio, we always look to real-life creatures for reference on how to design our characters, real or mythical. For New Moon, we had a special opportunity to travel down to wolf sanctuary in Southern California to observe wolves up close and personal. The key to looking at live reference is to form a knowledge base, study the creatures, their quirks and behaviors, the language between the pack. We looked for signs of what the creature was about and added those to the visual effects to make them believable.”

In Lucerne Valley, there is a sanctuary called Wolf Mountain where a dedicated group is trying to save wolves from extinction. This is where the Tippett artists traveled to spend personal time with the wolves, many tame enough to be approached and touched by strangers. There the artist could observe behaviors, pack interactions, hierarchy behaviors, and movement, and “closely examine the fur and its different lengths over the body, the coloring variations and markings, as well as the structure of the face, eyes, teeth and so on.”

The trip was extremely fruitful, but Phil Tippett, with his honed eye for perfection, added a second method to study fur under different controlled lighting and wind. “We had a bunch of photographs of wolves that we were studying but Phil was insisting that we take it to the next level and have something to touch, walk around, and actually do your own,” explained Fredenburg. This resulted in the creation of what became affectionately known as the “Frankenwolf”.
Tippett bought wolf pelts and cut them up with an Exacta knife and pasted it onto a taxidermy blank “so that we could do a lighting lab in two conditions? controlled lighting on our stage where we could shine very specific lights and look at how the fur responded, then we took it outside on an overcast day, which was perfect for New Moon. We came up with strategies for how to artistically make the wolves look better in flat lighting, which is what we were dealing with and is a very difficult lighting situation.”

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PART 1 OF 2

In this first of two features covering the efforts of
Vancouver’s Image Engine VFX studio, we meet some crew and find out how they worked.

History

For many years, the founding partners of Image Engine, namely Robin Hackl, Christopher Mossman and Greg Holmes wanted to nurture the company into new areas, to start taking on more film work. They’d grown a primarily television-focused business over the previous ten years, just like other boutique shops in Vancouver. When Neill Blomkamp arrived with the feature film pitch for ‘District 9′, this was exactly what they were waiting for.

They needed folks with feature film experience to drive the growth. Shawn Walsh began as a Digital Effects Supervisor on the existing episodic television work, but given his background, he quickly turned his attention to the task of creating a feature film division at the company. Now, Image Engine has grown roughly four or five fold in four or five years.

“The first person I called begging for help was Peter Muyzers who was my CG Supervisor when I worked as a lighter at The Moving Picture Company on ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’,” explains Walsh. “Both Peter and I were looking for an opportunity to create something in Vancouver and the film division at Image Engine fitted the bill for us. Pete and I hashed out a plan to grow the company into a film focused entity and set that plan in motion.” Now, film work accounts for about 90% of Image Engine’s revenue. Shawn Walsh says that Muyzers has been the key catalyst in their increased technical capabilities, the drive towards establishing a strong R&D department under John Haddon, and creatively reaching for the highest level possible. “It has been a really challenging three years, but we are really jazzed about our crew’s potential,” Walsh says.

PART 2 OF 2

Texturing, lighting and pampering the critters of ‘District 9′.
Image-Engine completes the story.

The Executive Producer of ‘District 9′ Shawn Walsh, had been following Director Neill Blomkamp’s career pretty closely for some years. It was a pleasant surprise when Neill got in touch one day asking if he was interested in collaborating on a project. “We’d nearly crossed paths many times, but we didn’t know each other,” adds Walsh. He says Neill sent him “great rambling bits of text that included all kinds of wildly imaginative stuff he wanted in the film. It was all very improvisational.”

Peter Muyzers, Digital Production Manager, thought there was something about the first connection with Neill’s assistant that convinced him to explore the film project a little further. “There was a brief outline in an email that immediately struck us as interesting,” Muyzers explains.

Blue Sky Studios completes ice-breaking VFX
for final frolic with Sid and Scrat.

Snow prints, rivers of lava, lava falls, exhaust, debris, bubbles, high viscous fluids, geysers, stink bombs, dust and steam. These are just a fraction of the effects needed for ‘Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs’. Blue Skys’ Effects Supervisor Kirk Garfield faced an imposing list of FX and volumetrics for the third installment of Ice Age. But did he flinch? “I like being busy and being under the gun and when I’m not, I’m bored. I’m a masochist that way. I’m used to my schedule looking like triple booked meetings after every hour for the entire day.”

Blue Sky was happy to oblige, upping the ante by adding several new tricks to their latest film. Snow gathering on fur, for example. “Before, they would leave the characters bare of snow. This time, they leveraged off the fur technology, placing particles along the roots of the fur anywhere from the roots to the tips to make it look like they were covered in snow.” But when asked what sequence demanded the most, Garfield chose the Mist Monster.

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