By Bill Desowitz

New York street scene.  All images: ©2011 Disney. JOHN CARTER™ ERB, Inc.

Before Star Wars and Avatar and all the rest was Edgar Rice Burroughs’ influential Under the Moons of Mars, which later became the more familiar novel, A Princess of Mars, followed by 10 more in the “Barsoom” series. Pixar’s Andrew Stanton had waited most of his adult life for someone to make it into a movie, and finally decided to take the plunge himself after Disney purchased the rights at his urging. The result has garnered more attention for its marketing missteps and opening weekend box office disappointment (an estimated $30.6 million) than for its thrilling moviemaking and stellar VFX.

Indeed, Stanton has delivered the mythical goods, using the familiar iconic story and visual shorthand to remind us where it all came from and why John Carter’s stranger in a strange land conceit is so timeless. While many have quibbled about the narrative deficiencies (Stanton’s original script with Mark Andrews and Michael Chabon was more epic in scope but scaled back for budgetary reasons), the animation by Double Negative and Barsoom environments by Cinesite are praiseworthy. Additionally, Halon’s previs (under the supervision of owner Daniel Gregoire) amped up the White Ape gladiatorial fight sequence with a hand-held observational style that suited Stanton’s vision.

Dneg owner and production VFX supervisor Peter Chiang says both lead VFX companies raised their game to deliver Stanton’s naturalistic vision (they called it “No Country for Old Men with Martians”). MPC and Nvisible also contributed when the workload increased to more than 1,500 shots.

The Princess’ wedding procession.

“We introduced Andrew to new tools and he took the stylistic renderings of Pixar to a more photoreal level,” Chiang observes. “He’s so used to signing off shots early in a grayscale stage or with very simplistic models and approving that animation, knowing that when he sees the renders, he’s sure of what he’s approved already. And so it meant that the pipeline for us could be far more streamlined. And he would accept signing off on animation before we would start to do the cloth sims and creature effects — all those additional layers after the principal animation had been signed off. So it made it far more fluid. He dialed into the shots and what changes he wanted made and we would guide him on the reality and getting the lighting in the comps.”

This represented the biggest creature work for Double Negative and so they rewrote all of their tools to handle the scope and complexity, right from rigging to muscle systems, eye renders and the complexity of eyes to cloth sims to creature effects. “We had to rebuild everything,” Chiang admits. “I started in May 2009 and we did a very simple proof test that ILM’s Roger Guyett supervised at a shoot in Vasquez Rocks involving two dozen shots with full creature on 35 mm by cinematographer Dan Mindel. We did lots of cheats for muscles before we developed the full muscle system. There was facial capture for the Tharks so we had to really get into the performance and render it in a very shrewd way. And from that we learned the demands of the film for Andrew. We rebuilt our creature pipeline, and did facial capture on set with two NTSC cameras and translated that into FACS shapes (using Mova capture) and then into the Tharks face. There was no translation to a real-time 3D model because the 3D model was too complicated and it always got filtered, and the throughput of that data didn’t work for the Tharks. Therefore, Andrew would sign off on the capture on set by looking at the straight video feeds of the NTSC cameras. Animation software was Maya and rendered in RenderMan and composited in Nuke.”

A Helium ship.

A Zodanga ship.

For the crowd system, they relied on Dneg’s in-house Mob and wrote tools for muscles, eyes, etc. They also worked very hard to make the green skin subconsciously like human skin so you weren’t thrown out of the film. “We went toward human characteristics so the muscle system was based on human muscle but stretched out,” Chiang continues. “Legacy designed the creatures with Andrew and provided ZBrush models to us and when we looked at the eyes, Andrew wanted to retain the performance of the actors and went back to white human eyes so when they evoked emotion, it resembled what the actors did. Weight was important. He wanted a lot of human characteristics and that was the challenge. We had to get the lighting and skin renderers and subsurface detail right, including the bump maps, displacement and skin sliding.”

The Thern Sanctuary.

Meanwhile, Cinesite completed 831 visual effects shots, which included creating and populating the majority of environments for the film. They also converted 87 minutes of the film into stereo 3-D. Cinesite’s senior VFX supervisor Sue Rowe spent several months on set in the UK and Utah; she was assisted by four other Cinesite supervisors. The sequences included Zodanga, a mile-long rusty metal tanker that crawls like a myriapod across the surface of Barsoom (supervised by Jonathan Neill); the beautiful and elegant city of Helium, with a huge glass palace in the middle (supervised by Christian Irles); the Thern sanctuary, a huge underground cave that forms around the characters as self-illuminating blue branches as they walk through it (supervised by Simon Stanley-Clamp); and the huge aerial battle between Zodanga and Helium. Supervised by Ben Shepherd, each side’s airships use solar wings to travel on light. Cinesite’s team also provided explosions, fire, digital doubles, a CG Thark City environment and set extensions based on photogrammetry.

Zodanga.

For Zodanga (designed by VFX art director Ryan Church), there was a lot of attention devoted to shader resource files, per frame asset visibility and prman XML stats analysis.  One of the major challenges of Zodanga is that it’s a city on legs, so the design of the legs, scale, materials and rigging had to match the time period of the story, while the surfaces and weathering had to make it look like they’d seen years of service on the Mars landscape. The textures, surfaces and edges were detailed to give a dirty, industrial feel using a combination of Photoshop, Mari and Mudbox in tandem with in-house shaders and lighting development. Since Zodanga is a very boxy, utilitarian-looking city, Cinesite needed to break up a lot of the straight edges to show wear and tear on the concrete. This was done by modeling and texturing using Mudbox as well as other techniques. Compositing used a template script in Nuke as a starting point for every shot. This was populated by around 60 layers to give compositing a very granular control to be able to tweak the lighting in Nuke.

Helium.

Helium (also designed by Church) proved very time consuming and render heavy to get full 3D renders; due to the sheer volume of assets required, Cinesite developed a proprietary hierarchical caching system, allowing for grouping and duplication of individual models within larger structures. The difficult part was accessing each different stage of this hierarchy, which was made possible by various filtering options. Each asset also had its own lighting and shading file, which was easily adjustable even from the top node of the hierarchy. Cinesite also developed level of detail files for modeling and texturing which could be manually adjusted or calculated automatically through a shot camera. The fully CG Helium environment was a huge challenge as this would be the look of the Helium city that would be reused in a number of other sequences. Both Helium Major and Helium Minor required high-res textures for parts of the city that they would push in on.

In the end, Cinesite achieved for Helium’s Palace of Light what Stanton termed “the jewel of the city.”

“Andrew was so ready for the CG process that he was ready to take on John Carter,” Chiang concludes. “He knew the fundamentals and his expertise was invaluable.”

The Palace of Light.

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN & VFXWorld.

By Bill Desowitz

Tron: Legacy offers improved animation layout as well as 3-D pipeline and performance capture improvements. © Disney Enterprises Inc.

Eric Barba of Digital Domain starting things off by reminding his VFX colleagues that the groundbreaking Tron was not even allowed to compete for an Oscar because computers were considered an unfair advantage. He then admitted it was intimidating trying to live up to a legend with Tron: Legacy. But Digital Domain not only raised the stakes with a host of new vehicles and environments in raising the Tron bar, but also how important it was to shoot in 3-D for an immersive experience. However, the biggest challenge was improving its performance capture capability (Face Plant) for turning the 60-year-old Jeff Bridges into the 35-year-old Clu avatar. Everyone knows what Bridges looked like in Against All Odds, and that’s what they were aiming for, using the actor to help drive the performance as his younger self. This involved a smaller footprint, writing better tracking data and improved data wrangling (with the help of EA in Vancouver), but also putting the volume process into the hands of the animators with a new interface for faster and quicker results.

Inception’s iconic folding city was one of several diverse challenges. © Warner Bros.

Meanwhile, in his Inception presentation, Franklin described how each sequence had its own unique technical challenge: the zero gravity required monumental rig and wire removal, plus rebuilt environments and floating CG objects at the end, and necessitated roto because there was no greenscreen work. The strange Limbo City featured all sorts of conceptual challenges and they arrived at a procedural method for combining the structure of a glacier with 20th century architecture. For the Bond-inspired ski chase, they needed very convincing environment work and practical miniatures from New Deal and then blowing it all up. And for the folding city– which has become the film’s iconic image — they had a large logistical challenge in recording and reproducing the architecture of Paris so that it held up to the scrutiny that it demanded.

Hereafter begins with a tsunami bang. © Warner Bros.

For Clint Eastwood’s unconventional Hereafter, Michael Owens revealed the importance of Scanline’s improvements in fluid sim with Flowline for the creation of a naturalistic tsunami in keeping with the tone of the film about coping with near-death experiences. Aside from water interaction, digital doubles figured extensively in this sequence. They had a motion capture shoot, to build a library of moves for digi-doubles (including Massive doubles). Not surprisingly, motions included running and stumbling actions, along with various reactions to the wave, accomplished with more conventional falls into crash pads. But to simulate characters in water, they also used a traveling wire rig, in order to capture characters in water — from getting pummeled by strong currents, to treading water and trying to surface and stay afloat and floating dead underwater. Ultimately, much of this motion capture was combined with keyframe, traditional animation, as animators worked to incorporate characters into digital water flows, both above and below water.

Alice in Wonderland is a synthesis of old and new techniques utilizing the latest and greatest tools. © Disney Enterprises Inc.

Ken Ralston joked about how much fun it was working with Tim Burton for the first time on Alice in Wonderland and figuring out how to communicate with him. He then described the synthesis of techniques at Sony Pictures Imageworks that went into the making of the fantastical film, showcasing an abundance of CG characters and virtual environments. They decided early on to acquire the live-action performance in a greenscreen environment, and many of the characters were a hybrid of live action and animation. Numerous motion capture tools were tested mainly as reference for what was ultimately handled as animation. The challenge was to find the balance where CG and hybrid animated characters blended together with the live actors to look like they were part of the same world. Alice falling down the rabbit hole, for instance, is a combination of a live-action Alice on wire rigs on a greenscreen shoot; and the whole environment is CG. The Red Queen, shot digitally, was accomplished by, enlarging her head and giving her an hourglass waist to blend more naturally. The Tweedles were a hybrid with Matt Lucas’ eyes, nose and mouth along with keyframe animation, again, using MoCap as reference.

Iron Man 2 boasts better photorealism and an advanced lighting system. © Marvel and Paramount.

For Iron Man 2, Janek Sirrs, the overall supervisor, explained how ILM (under the supervision of Ben Snow) raised its heavy metal game in not only creating more CG suits for Iron Man, War Machine and the drones, but also got closer and lingered longer on the shots, thanks to the improved look and better animation. He also relayed the explosive firepower that went into Double Negative’s Monte Carlo fight between Whiplash and Iron Man’s suit-up and armor. He also detailed how ILM raised the stakes for the climactic battle in the Japanese garden, which required full use of Imocap, background plates, virtual cameras and other tools in the extensive arsenal to pull off a photoreal-looking battle.

The naturalistic stakes are raised in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. © Warner Bros.

With the penultimate Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, Tim Burke explored how they’ve continued down the path of gritty realism for this road movie outside of Hogwarts for the first time. He said that MPC’s opening set piece featured six of Harry’s friends shape-shifted to look like the famous wizard to fool the Death Eaters. There was plenty of CG environments, CG digi doubles and a mixture of stunt work and face replacements. For the sake of believability, they used the real performances of each actor to drive the CG Harry and then made the transformations a hybrid of Harry and the real characters. This entailed Daniel Radcliffe playing Harry seven times and using motion control to shoot multiple passes for every single shot with Radcliffe. Burke also described the improvements in both look and performance for Nagini the snake (MPC) and Dobby and Kreacher (Framestore).

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN & VFXWorld.

By Bill Desowitz

The challenge was to create a more feminine-looking demon yet still iconic in appearance. © 2010 Season of the Witch Distributions, LLC All Rights Reserved. Photos by: Tippett Studio.

Partial transformation with dark gray skin included warping and coloration techniques.

The dark gray skin proved another challenge given that so much of the film takes place in darkness. “We did a combination of a makeup pass, which is almost like a dry brushing over it, and then just finding places where you need to pull out some of the highlights so it has the modeling you need to be able to read in all the shots,” Clark explains. “We played the skin like a rotten, mummy: nothing too moist, with a lot of wear marks on it.”

The fight choreography offered placement challenges as well. Leven was sent to Shreveport, Louisiana, where they were re-shooting the third act. “There was going to be a fight scene and they sent us back some cut footage of the stunt team and it was a full-on wrestling match with a lot of hand-to-hand grappling,” Clark continues. “So we had Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman in the main part of this fight and we matched the placement of the stuntman standing in for the demon.

“But Ron Perlman’s character has a signature move (a bear hug and then he rears back with a head butt) that was challenging to work with. At one point he tangles with the demon, which does a 180 in his grasp and they’re embracing and Perlman does the heat butt into the demon, which doesn’t react. And then the demon envelops him in the wings and there’s a blast furnace of fire that engulfs him. We had to figure out how to achieve this effectively and economically? We did this with a combination of covering his face with little licks of flame coming up from underneath and did some 2D comp coloration changes of his skin starting to darken. We didn’t want to get too grisly, since this is PG-13, so we covered him pretty quickly with flame and played the rest of it out with internally lit flames with shadowy shapes.”

There’s also a partial transformation sequence that necessitated facial work by Tippett. This was supervised by Leven in collaboration with Aharon Bourland, Tippett’s CG supervisor. This was achieved with a blend of warping and coloration techniques. Some of the shots in the sequence were actually shared with UPP in Prague, which previously worked on plates and so there was some back and forth to attain proper continuity.

The final challenge was the death of the demon. Tippett had boards with a rough outline and empty plates with superimposed shot descriptions provided by others. “Figuring it out wasn’t easy,” Clark says. “We came up with something after conversing with Adam using movie terms and old film references and then turned around and explained it to everyone else in terms they could understand. It was the last shot that we finished, right up to the wire and quite an ordeal. It was a huge assembly of comping elements and animation. The demon turns and explodes and the apparition goes up through the ceiling. We did something inspired by Hellboy where we concentrated on the buildup: the demise of the demon was triggered by the reading of a verse from the book. We built it over a series of shots so it doesn’t just happen in one shot. We had little patches on the demon that start to crack and result in a glow that looks like it’s burning from within. It turned out pretty well. It’s always difficult trying to come up with something that doesn’t look too familiar.”

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN & VFXWorld.

It’s pretty much back to basics this year with lots of superheroes, sequels, remakes, origin stories, kid’s fare and assorted action/adventures — and plenty of 3-D, of course. Plus a few originals and potential surprises. Not covered but worth mentioning are: Thor, X-Men First Class, Rise of the Apes (with Weta doing some fancy new hair grooming and performance capture for CG apes), Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol (with Brad Bird making his live-action debut), Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, Sherlock Holmes 2, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Priest, Super 8, The Thing, Conan the Barbarian, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, The Smurfs, Spy Kids 4: All the Time in the World, Hop, The Muppets and Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked.

Sucker Punch (Warner Bros., March 25)

Zack Snyder’s Alice in Wonderland-inspired mind-bender could be this year’s Inception or Shutter Island. Babydoll (Emily Browning) tries to escape from an asylum through her imagination with an elite fighting force of inmates and a virtual arsenal. The director of 300 and Watchmen goes for a stylized mash-up of World War I, samurai and serpents in his first original work. John DJ Desjardin (Watchmen) serves as overall visual effects supervisor, with production design by Rick Carter (Avatar). VFX is provided by MPC, Prime Focus, Animal Logic, Pixomondo, among others. (Image Courtesy of Warner Bros)

Source Code (Summit, April 1)

Duncan Jones follows up his intriguing Moon with a Groundhog Day-like techno-thriller, in which soldier Jake Gyllenhaal is sent into the body of a civilian to continuously relive the last eight minutes of his life until he discovers who was responsible for a train bombing and to prevent the next terrorist attack. VFX by MPC Vancouver, Modus FX, Mr. X, Rodeo FX and others. (Image courtesy of Summit Ent)

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Buena Vista, May 20, 3-D)

Rob Marshall (Chicago) takes over for Gore Verbinski in helming the fourth sequel to Disney’s popular Pirates franchise — and the first in 3-D from Cinesite. Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) and Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) go after the fountain of youth only to discover that Blackbeard (Ian McShane) and an old flame (Penelope Cruz) are after it too. Can’t wait to see how ILM raises its game (this time under the supervision of Ben Snow) along with support from MPC, and PLF. (Image courtesy of Disney Enterprises Inc)

The Tree of Life (Fox Searchlight, May 27)

Every Terrence Malick film is an event and this one appears to be a summary statement about the mystical relationship between humanity and nature: the loss of innocence for a young boy growing up in Texas in the ’50s becomes an existential journey into the labyrinth of life in adulthood (played by Sean Penn) and the discovery of the miraculous. Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain co-star. VFX is overseen by Dan Glass with assistance by the legendary Doug Trumbull, and vendors include Double Negative, Prime Focus, Method Studios and others. (Image courtesy of Fox Searchlight)

Green Lantern (Warner Bros., June 17, 3-D)

Ryan Reynolds plays the DC superhero imbued with otherworldly powers thanks to a mystical ring and entrusted with policing the universe with an intergalactic squadron. Martin Campbell (Casino Royale) directs; Karen Goulekas and Kent Houston are the overall supervisors, with Sony Pictures Imageworks leading the vfx charge (spearheaded by Jim Berney) and support from Rising Sun Pictures and others. (Image courtesy of Warner Bros)

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Paramount/DreamWorks, July 1)

Michael Bay’s third go-around takes inspiration from Pink Floyd, as the Autobots learn of a Cybertronian spacecraft hidden on the moon and try to beat the Decepticons in learning its secrets and gaining advantage in their final battle. ILM is back with new tweaks under Scott Farrar’s leadership and Digital Domain lends support as well with others. (Image courtesy of Paramount/DreamWorks)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (Warner Bros., July 15, 3-D)

David Yates helms the thrilling conclusion to Harry’s battle with Lord Voldermort for control of the wizarding world and closure for our conflicted hero. Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) return to Hogwarts to seek and destroy the final horcruxes. London’s VFX industry in Soho has come of age with Potter, and it will be a treat to witness the final achievements of Double Negative, MPC, Framestore and Cinesite along with great support by Baseblack and Rising Sun (under Tim Burke’s overall supervision once again). (Image courtesy of Warner Bros)

Captain America: The First Avenger (Paramount, July 22)

Another Marvel superhero comes to the big screen under the direction of Joe Johnston (The Wolfman, Jurassic Park III): Chris Evans plays Steve Rogers, who turns into Captain America, the country’s defender, after volunteering for a secret research project that goes awry. Samuel Jackson reprises his role as Nick Fury and Hugo Weaving co-stars as The Red Skull. Christopher Townsend is the overall supervisor with Double Negative as the lead vendor and Matte World Digital providing additional contributions, among others. (Image courtesy of Paramount)

Cowboys & Aliens (Universal/DreamWorks, July 29)

Jon Favreau (Iron Man) tackles a supernatural western with Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde and Sam Rockwell: Craig lands in Absolution, Arizona, in 1873 with a loss of memory and a mysterious shackle around one wrist, who teams up with hard-nosed Ford in combating marauders from the sky bent on taking over the planet. ILM, Legacy Effects and others provide the vfx mayhem. (Image courtesy of Universal/DreamWorks)

Hugo Cabret (Sony, Dec. 9, 3-D)

Martin Scorsese’s first film shot in 3-D is an adaptation of Brian Selznick’s bestseller about an orphan boy (Asa Butterfield) living a secret life in the walls of a Paris train station in the 1930s and a mysterious encounter with Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley), the father of special effects. Scorsese told The Guardian: “Every shot is rethinking cinema, rethinking narrative — how to tell a story with a picture. Now, I’m not saying we have to keep throwing javelins at the camera, I’m not saying we use it as a gimmick, but it’s liberating. It’s literally a Rubik’s Cube every time you go out to design a shot, and work out a camera move, or a crane move. But it has a beauty to it also. People look like… like moving statues. They move like sculpture, as if sculpture is moving in a way. Like dancers…” Rob Legato (Shutter Island) serves as overall supervisor; Pixomondo LA is the lead vendor. Legato tells AWN/VFXWorld, “The Melies recreations are stunning looking. In some cases impossible for the trained eye to see what might have been restored from what was recreated. First choice, of course, is restoration but we have recreated some moments and the behind-the-scenes shooting of the same. We recreated the glass house studio and the painted backdrops and fantastic costumes. A treat for film lovers.” (Image courtesy of Sony Pictures)

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN & VFXWorld.

One way to cut the time taken to render a work is by rendering the artwork in a cluster server; distributing the workload among the server nodes. The rendering runs parallel in all the server nodes thus reducing the amount of time taken to complete the work.

How does the process works? The scene file is sent to the main controller server which inspects for any missing plug-ins, image and object files before the frames distributed to the “worker” server nodes for rendering. Once the rendering on the assigned frame is completed, the “worker” node sends the completed frame to the controller server and takes the next frame to render automatically. The completed frames are then compiled by the controller server. A server farm consisting 200 server nodes would be rendering 200 frames simultaneously saving precious time on rendering.

Many CGI creators face difficulties in producing high end CGI art in a shorter deadline. Render farm simply takes away the amount of time taken by the CGI artist by distribute-rendering the work in cluster server. This allows the CGI artist to focus more on the quality of the art and allow them to take up more CGI projects. Ultimately, the remote render farm technology provides a more competitive edge on CGI production and flourish the industry.

Pixel Masters provides remote render farm service with 64-bit quad core AMD and Intel processor based server clusters. For optimum performance, each server nodes are installed with 8Gb to 16Gb RAM.