Archive notice: This article was originally published on March 13, 2011. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
DP: What were the greatest compositing challenges for Uncharted Territory on the mammoth project “Anonymous”? What equipment did Uncharted Territory use?
Marc Weigert: We used eyeon Fusion exclusively for compositing. For 3D, 3DSMax and Massive, as well as V-Ray for rendering. Shotgun was used for shot management. For hardware, we used dual quad cores for 3D and single quad cores (i7) for the compositing workstations with 24 GB RAM, as well as Nvidia Quadro 4800 models and Fermi 470 video cards.
We had only a comparatively small render farm with 50 computers, each equipped with 24 GB RAM. Around 20 of them had Nvidia cards for GPU compositing renders; the rest had some “10-euro” video cards for 3D CPU renders. Storage totalled 100 terabytes, all on Windows Server 2008, 64 bit. And in the last three months, also 1,800 bread rolls, 20 large jars of Nutella, 24 kg of sliced sausage and 6 kg of Appenzeller “extra spicy”.
DP: With a historical drama, one does not initially think of conspicuous visual effects. What were the challenges?
Marc Weigert: There were quite a few! For “Anonymous”, we created all of 16th-century London in 3D. These were extensive Max files that could be rendered only in sections. We routinely had around 20 render passes, including beauty, GI, AO, spec, normals, Zdepth, shadow and renderIDs. For some large shots, the city was then divided into three parts.
We rendered separate layers for people created with Massive, water elements, ships and trees. That already puts you at around 420 elements that have to be processed in compositing. Then there is smoke from hundreds of chimneys, which was made directly in the Fusion Particle System. The composites were immense.
In addition, even normally relatively simple greenscreen composites became extremely complicated because most costumes, especially those of Queen Elizabeth (Vanessa Redgrave), had many semi-transparent silk collars through which we had to key our green LED tracking markers.
All scenes with boats were filmed dry, directly on the green studio floor. This is difficult to key at first because the boats naturally cast unwanted shadows on the greenscreen floor, and in most cases we could not light away the shadows because that would otherwise produce reflections that were too strong or extremely unattractive bounce light from the floor onto the boat. The water interaction also had to be created artificially. Fusion was used for that as well.
DP: To what extent did the compositing workflow for the artists change as a result of the supercomputing features? What advantages arise?
Marc Weigert: At Uncharted Territory, we are shifting more and more work that used to be created quite “traditionally” in 3D programs such as Maya or Max toward compositing with Fusion.
We already did this on “2012”, when Rony Soussan (the Compositing Supervisor on “Anonymous”) linked Fusion’s 3D Particle System to the soundtrack using expressions in order to add breath automatically for the actors in the winter scenes.
The same system was used again on “Anonymous”. All the other studios that worked on similar scenes for us create something like that in Maya. In Fusion, it ran practically in real time, and we could make changes via seconds. The traditional workflow means that for every small change one has to go back to Maya, change the shader, render again – if the render farm happens to be free – and then only later see the changes in the compositing program. Then the director’s comments are added, and the whole thing starts all over again…
We programmed many new tricks in Fusion, for example to realise projection mapping in the fastest possible way. In other words, to map a normal 2D image, sometimes also rendered still images to save rendering time, directly onto simple 3D objects in Fusion. This enabled us to create a three-dimensional camera movement later in compositing. We made wonderful crane moves on simple HDRI photos that I shot in England, for example in Salisbury Cathedral. Hauling a crane there and actually filming with a camera crew would have been completely inconceivable in budget terms.
In addition, we wrote a great many tools around the “World Coordinate Pass”. The WCP was rendered directly from V-Ray and describes the X, Y and Z coordinates of every individual pixel. This makes it possible to create a pseudo-3D image directly in Fusion, again to add a small camera move to a rendered still image or to insert further elements easily into 3D space through compositing. All these developments were GPU-supported!
Further links:
- Marc Weigert’s blog on postproduction
