This article by Rayk Schroeder originally appeared in DP 02 : 2013. Please also note our interview on Cloud Atlas by Mirja Fürst from the same issue.

with production costs of around 100 million dollars, “Cloud Atlas” by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski siblings is currently one of the most expensive independent films produced. The elaborate visual effects of the almost three-hour work, in which six different time periods had to be realised, are impressively successful. Rise | Visual Effects Studios worked on over 100 shots for the film, transforming today’s Glasgow into the San Francisco of the 1970s, among other things.

David Mitchell wrote the novel “Cloud Atlas” in 2004. It tells six interconnected stories over a period of 500 years, starting on a sailing ship in 1849 and moving on to Cambridge in the 1930s. It continues in San Francisco in 1973, London in 2012, Neo-Seoul in 2144 and ends in a post-apocalyptic world in 2346. The book was considered unfilmable due to its intricately interwoven stories. But the three top directors Tom Tykwer (Perfume, Run Lola Run) and Lana and Andy Wachowski (Matrix trilogy) wrote a screenplay and dared to adapt the novel into a film. The result was the most expensive German cinema film to date, in which the same actors embody different ages, genders and races in each era. The film boasts a large number of stars: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Ben Wishaw, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant and many more. The visual effects shots to be worked on were as varied as the individual stories. Rise | Visual Effects Studios worked on a total of over 100 shots from almost all the episodes. The following article describes how the Glasgow of today was transformed into the San Francisco of the 1970s. The LIDAR scans from the set not only helped with the matchmoving.

The task

The Luisa Rey episode takes place in San Francisco in the 1970s. Luisa Rey, played by Halle Berry, is a journalist who gets to the bottom of a nuclear power scandal and is then hunted by a contract killer. However, the story was not filmed in San Francisco, but in Glasgow, among other places. The streets were largely redesigned for this purpose, with typical San Francisco letterboxes, rubbish bins, street signs and other details. As Glasgow has left-hand traffic and not right-hand traffic like San Francisco, all the road markings had to be changed. To reduce the retouching effort, these were therefore covered with asphalt-like colour. As a result, they were no longer visible in many shots and did not have to be retouched away.

In order to transform Glasgow into San Francisco, the streets were to be extended with typical wooden houses or existing houses were to be replaced or remodelled. The typical telegraph poles also had to be integrated. For this purpose, there were some matching pole stumps on the set (redecorated lampposts or newly erected poles). In addition to these complex set extensions, comparably simple work such as removing the still visible road markings, surveillance cameras, adding muzzle flashes with corresponding light interaction and the matching bullet holes also had to be realised.

LIDAR scanning on set

Pointcloud9, a subsidiary of Rise | Visual Effects Studios, scanned all sets and vehicles with a Faro LIDAR scanner. The point clouds were cleaned, converted into meshes and made available to the VFX houses involved as required.

Firstly, a brief explanation of the LIDAR scanning process: LIDAR is the abbreviation for Light Detection And Ranging. A LIDAR scanner works with a mostly infrared laser beam. This is directed in various directions by means of a rotating mirror and used to measure the distance of objects and surfaces encountered. This laser scanning can take place in different quality levels/resolutions, so that details of up to a fraction of a millimetre can be recognised in the scan, depending on the time available or the quality required. These measured points result in a point cloud that represents the environment and can be processed accordingly. Such a scan only takes a few minutes and is also quickly set up and prepared. LIDAR scanners have been used for some time in both geographical and construction applications. In recent years, they have also become increasingly common in the visual effects sector. The scene in San Francisco presented here mainly takes place along a complete street. The entire street was scanned with the LIDAR scanner for later processing. A total of four scans had to be carried out to capture all the houses on the long street. Special marking spheres were set up so that these scans could later be linked together. These represented corresponding reference points for the scanner. The scanner also recorded the colour values of the measured points, which simplified the subsequent texturing of objects. The LIDAR scans enabled a dimensionally accurate image of the complete set, down to the millimetre.

Further processing of the LIDAR scans

In the Berlin office, the scans had to be further processed using various proprietary software. First of all, the artists registered the scans belonging to a set, i.e. the marker spheres were used to link them together to form a huge point cloud, similar to a stitched panoramic photo, but in 3D. In the end, this point cloud consisted of over 200 million points. Areas that could not be captured in a single scan were included in the other scans. This meant that even partially obscured objects could be visualised in the point cloud. Of course, areas that were not necessary for the actual set were also scanned during the scanning process. In order to keep only the necessary information in the point clouds, they were first cleaned and all unnecessary points were deleted. Especially with highly reflective surfaces such as car paintwork, it was difficult for the LIDAR scanner to capture the exact distance of the points to be measured. As a result, very different points, some of which did not match at all, were recorded in the point cloud in place of the smooth surfaces, which then had to be manually smoothed and filtered using appropriate tools. The meshes could then be created much more easily and accurately and exported in different levels of detail for the various areas of application.

Matchmoving with the help of LIDAR scans

One area of application for the LIDAR scans was matchmoving with PFTrack and Syntheyes. The exact geometries were particularly helpful for street canyons in order to be able to track difficult camera movements and create them at the correct scale. Thanks to the spatial information already available in the geometry, all that was needed was to assign distinctive points to the appropriate locations in the shots and the matchmoving was much easier to manage.

San Francisco from Maya

To make the streets look like San Francisco, 3D artist David Salamon modelled various typical wooden houses with lots of details such as cables hanging out, wooden joints, curtains in the windows, fire escapes, etc. He also created telegraph poles with tangled cables and fuse boxes. He also created telegraph poles with tangled cables and fuse boxes. With the help of the LIDAR scans, the entire street was decorated with houses and telegraph poles. The production company provided Rise | Visual Effects Studios with HDR images from various positions on the streets. This allowed reflections on the windows of the houses to be simulated by projecting the HDR images onto rough geometries of the surrounding buildings using the LIDAR scans. They were also important for the correct lighting of the scene. The respective shot cameras were positioned in the street at the appropriate locations that matched the set. The Maya render transmitter for the render manager Renderpal had already been adapted for other projects so that several cameras could be sent for rendering at the same time. For the San Francisco shots, it was also possible to send all the shot cameras for rendering at once and the submitter created a separate render job for each camera. In the end, you had several EXR sequences for each shot with all the important passes as well as IDs for the various building and telegraph pole parts so that you could adjust their colours separately.

Compositing in Nuke

In Nuke, the various passes (Diffuse, Specular, Reflection, Refraction, Ambient Occlusion et cetera) were combined and the houses were colour-matched to the shot plates using the ID passes. In some shots, modern surveillance cameras could be seen, which were concealed by skilfully positioning the telegraph poles and therefore no longer had to be retouched out.

Where this was not possible, they were retouched out. The retouching of the road markings was also simplified by the LIDAR scans: In the Maya scene, a rough geometry for the road was created from the LIDAR scan and exported as an OBJ together with the associated camera. This made it possible to project corresponding patches or render the road UV-unwrapped in Nuke, remove the markings on the UV map and project the retouching back again.

An OBJ for Nuke was exported from the complete street with all buildings and traffic signs to make it easier to position roto-shapes of street signs or buildings and retouching for the surveillance cameras. Among other things, the scene shows a car driving into a fire hydrant, from which a fountain of water then shoots out. As the houses or a matte painting had to be used behind this fountain in some shots, the water had to be placed over it again and correctly integrated into the shot. Nuke’s particle system was used for this. Dots were emitted that could be adapted to the original motion-blurred water droplets using the appropriate motion blur settings and colour corrections. As Halle Berry was seen in the foreground in several shots, her hair often obscured the areas where the 3D houses were supposed to be. In the plate, however, there was often only a burnt-out bright sky. It was therefore necessary to extract the hair from the plate as far as possible and match its colour to the darker background houses or, if necessary, to track corresponding hair patches to their heads. In addition to the tasks already described, the team had to retime some shots by a “crooked” factor. PFTrack often delivered the best results, especially when it came to fine details. This meant that the retouching of retiming artefacts could be reduced to a minimum, but not completely eliminated. The challenge with the sequence presented here was the uniform look of the set extensions across shots and the correct integration as a rather inconspicuous background element. However, as everything was based on a single Maya scene that had been set up once, the 3D department had created an excellent basis, so that the main compositing effort consisted of colour-matching the renderings to the shot plates and rotoscoping any foreground elements.

The entire film was shot on analogue 35 mm film material. This led to the following problem in some shots with a static camera: the image was not stable in itself and wobbled very differently in the individual areas. This made it extremely difficult to integrate the CG elements, as simple (planar) tracking was not sufficient. One possibility would have been to link individual trackers to individual points of a gridwarp and thus adapt the 3D telegraph poles to the unstable image. This option proved to be too time-consuming and inconvenient. Therefore, the artists Gene Hammond-Lewis and Gonzalo Moyano Fernandez wrote a triangulation script. It works like a mixture of CornerPin and GridWarp and automatically connected all trackers with each other in such a way that a network of triangles spanned between them. This made it possible to track many different points and automatically generate an STMap based on these trackers. This distorted the telegraph poles to match the plate. The Luisa Rey sequence was almost completely edited at Rise. Only some minor retouching and muzzleflashes were done directly at the production company by their in-house artists. The sequence also included other shots outside the described street scene: after Luisa Rey visits a nuclear power plant on an island, she is forced off the bridge by a hitman as she leaves and sinks in her car. For several shots, a matte painting had to be made of the nuclear power station both by day and by night. The original bridge was in Scotland. Of course, Luisa Rey and her car could not be pushed directly off this bridge into the water. That’s why part of the bridge was scanned and the road surface was recreated on the tarmac at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. Elements such as bridge railings, lanterns and surrounding water were all added later and the car was partially replaced by a 3D model.

For the sinking car, the artists Simon Ohler and Andreas Giesen created realistic air bubbles in Houdini, which were combined with rotated elements. The water pressure caused the car’s windows to crack over time. These cracks were created along splines and their formation was animated manually using keyframes, also in Houdini.

Summary

In total, Rise was involved in five of the six episodes. Due to the diversity of the tasks to be accomplished, the work on the more than 100 shots was very varied and offered a wide range of challenges. In addition to the aforementioned VFX shots, an aeroplane was also blown up and other CG environments, such as a satellite station on a mountain, were created. After the completion of “Cloud Atlas”, Rise further optimised the internal LIDAR Maya workflow in order to easily illuminate a 3D scene using HDR images projected onto scanned geometry. Once the scanned location has been measured and the HDR images processed, creatures, characters, vehicles or anything else that needs to move through a set can now be automatically illuminated in next to no time.

With the help of captured mirror balls, it is also possible to change the lighting situation shot by shot, for example if the 3D object is to be in the same location once during the day and once at night. I will report on this procedure in more detail in the next issue of DP

The post Back to the 70s – Cloud Atlas first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Mirja Fürst.

In nuce: Scanline VFX has released a VFX breakdown of the comic book adaptation The Batman, in which fictional grassroots politician Bella Reál pleads for “Change for Gotham”, Riddler leaves another piece of the puzzle for the Batman with a “Sins oft he Fathers”, Gotham Square Garden is flooded after an assassination attempt – and Batman himself gets into a fistfight with Riddler’s henchmen. The almost three-hour action thriller The Batman was realised by director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, War for the Planet of the Apes); Reeves was assisted on the screenplay by screenwriter and novelist Peter Craig (The Hunger Games 1 & 2, Bad Boys for Life, Top Gun: Maverick, among others).

Click further: Below are more VFX breakdowns from Scanline VFX that demonstrate what’s in the pipeline for the girls and boys at the VFX house.

• 25.06.2020: Current VFX showcase from Scanline: Spiderman, Aquaman and mechanical men join forces in the showcase by visual effects company Scanline.
• 16.09.2021: Godzilla vs. Kong: Scanline VFX in the eye of the (monstrous) beholder: Kaijus bang at striking distance!

The Batman | VFX Showreel | Scanline VFX

The post The Batman | VFX-Breakdown first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: Who hasn’t read the classic adventure novel “Around the World in 80 Days” by Jules Verne, in which the adventurer Phileas Fogg, together with his butler Passepartout, sets off to circle the globe in just 80 days. And all without a German Intercity Express, French TGV, Japanese maglev train – or a 9-euro ticket.

What’s on the eyes? These two VFX break-down bites are dedicated to the third and fourth episodes of the first series season and are packed with set extensions, smoke filters, desert storms, particle simulations and – as befits true globetrotters of yesteryear – rides on camel backs, in horse-drawn carriages and in front of bluescreen walls.

Click further: If you want to see for yourself that MPC is not only capable of world travel and literary adaptations, but also squeaky blue hedgehogs and video game adaptations, click back to 19 October 2021 . Or click back to 28/04/2021, when Pikachu and Friends stalked through the pedestrian zone.

Around The World in 80 Days – Episode 3 VFX

Around The World in 80 Days – Episode 4 VFX

The post Around the world in 80 days | VFX Breakdown first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: In this VFX breakdown, the Prague-based VFX company PFX shows what impressive VFXs the Czechs can pull off. A total of 38 minutes of the 134-minute running time of the remarkable feature film Zatopek, about the Czech long-distance runner Emil Zatopek, were equipped with visual effects. The crowd simulation in particular, which PFX used to populate the digitally resurrected sports stadiums through which multiple Olympian Emil Zatopek pedals his way through, is sure to delight your little eyes.

What is Zatopek about? Zatopek is the first feature-length film adaptation of the iconic long-distance runner who made sporting history at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki. By winning the 5,000 and 10,000 metres, but also coming top in the marathon, he achieved a historic triple that is still unique today. The Czech wonder runner’s nickname: The Locomotive.

Click to continue: Can you keep up with Zatopek once the long-distance great makes the rubber of the running track glow? So that you know why it’s worth running after Zatopek when he’s kicking up his heels, we’ve also linked to the film trailer. Why don’t you make a stopover at PFX’s online presence ? We think: put on your trainers, oil up the pipeline – and run along!

Zatopek VFX Breakdown

Zatopek Trailer

The post Zatopek | VFX Breakdown first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

Harry Potter’s school years in book and film form were incredibly successful. As author J.K. Rowling put an end to the adventures of the sorcerer’s apprentice after volume 7, the reliably lucrative box office results of the franchise failed to materialise. So a new corner was reached for, and the fictional encyclopaedia of mythical creatures became the story basis for a new film series.

Rowling had already published the two small volumes “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” and “Quidditch Throughthe Ages” under a pseudonym in 2001; she wrote the animal encyclopaedia under the author’s name Newt Scamander. Both books are standard reading at Hogwarts School in the Harry Potter novels. Rowling wrote the story of the creation of the encyclopaedia about Newt Scamander and his magical creatures, which is set 70 years before Harry’s lifetime, in screenplay form. The first “Fantastic Beasts” part was released in cinemas in Germany on 16 November 2016; the film was released on DVD and Bluray in April 2017.

For the spin-off, numerous full CG creatures had to be created that deviated visually from the norm. Double Negative, Framestore, Rodeo FX, Milk VFX, Image Engine and Cinesite were the VFX studios involved in the project.

Creatures at MPC

MPC realised over 220 VFX shots for the film; the VFX supervisor for the team was Ferran Domenech (“Legend of Tarzan”, “Godzilla”). MPC is already experienced in creating magical effects, as the studio was part of the VFX crew for all 8 previous Harry Potter films. For “Fantastic Beasts”, MPC created the titles including the Warner Bros. logo, various crowd and environment extensions as well as the Manhattan environment when Newt arrives in NY by ferry. The most complex task, however, was to bring the three creatures Demiguise, Billiwig and Occamy to life – including all the destructions that his enormous ability to grow brings with it.

The film was mainly shot at Leavesden Studios in north-west London, where the other parts of the Harry Potter saga were also created. Some other original plates, such as the one in the shopping centre where Demiguise and Occamy are hiding, were filmed in Birmingham.

Monkey with silver curls

Demiguise – a small monkey-like creature that can turn invisible and read the future – was the first creature MPC worked on for the project. The team used the specially developed FurtilityGroom technology combined with simulated cloth geometry strands to create his long, silver-coloured hair. These allowed for natural hair movement and interaction with the creature’s limbs and the environment. To create the effect of Demiguise becoming invisible, the Furtility team developed a new texture projection tool that allowed the background images to be painted over the fur and moved realistically. Demiguise’s facial and body movements were animated with keyframes.

Feathered giant snake

The most complicated creature, however, was the feathered serpent Occamy, which has wings and a dragon-like face. Occamy is always as big as the space that surrounds it – in the case of the hall-like department stores’, the magical creature had to wrap itself around the roof beams and look incredibly long. To achieve this, the asset team created five different variations of the body. The enormous body was also divided into different parts so that the space could be completely filled and the carefully designed composition adjusted in each shot.

For the realisation of Occamy, the team refined the SnakeRigging technology previously developed for the Harry Potter films, with a snake body covered in feathers providing an additional challenge that was overcome using MPC’s Furtility tool. The creature’s complex transformation performance, ranging in size from a house to a mouse, was achieved by customising the Furtility tool to allow Occamy to scale interactively.

In the sequence, Newt scares Occamy, causing it to get caught in the roof structure of the department stores’ and destroy the building as it tries to free itself. For this scene, MPC built a detailed set extension of the attic including beams, screws and nails, wood panelling and an outer layer of shingles. The team realised the destruction effects of the CG set using the studio’s own destruction technology Kali.

Dinner at Cinesite

Cinesite realised around 100 VFX shots for “Fantastic Beasts” – including the scene in which Newt enters the magical world with the help of his suitcase, various New York CG environments and the entire dinner sequence in the Goldstein apartment. The project kicked off at the beginning of 2016, after which a small but permanent team worked continuously until the end of September 2016 to complete the shots. Like MPC, Cinesite was also on board as a VFX service provider for all previous Harry Potter films; the studio has already worked on a total of 2,000 shots for the series.

Cinesite supervisor on the project was Andrew (aka Andy) Morley, who has been working in the digital film industry since early 2000. He was involved in “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” as technical supervisor. His other projects include “Batman Begins”, “Transformers”, “Avatar” and “Gods of Egypt”.

DP: Post-production for the first “Harry Potter” instalments took place more than 15 years ago. How has working on the film series changed for you in the meantime?

Andy Morley: The technology and artist skill base that we were able to draw on for the fantastic beasts is much more mature and reliable compared to the earlier Potter days. Today it can deliver any effect imaginable, so the challenge is increasingly to create visually compelling VFX work that audiences around the world have never seen before. The expertise and skillset available in the UK guarantees that the films will look great across the entire franchise.

DP: How did you realise the scenes where Newt disappears into the magical world through the suitcase?

Andy Morley: One of the key sequences involving the suitcase took place inside the Goldstein flat. In it, Jacob hesitates to jump into the suitcase after Newt. Partly because it is much more difficult for him than for the slender Newt due to his girth. As was to be expected, he gets stuck and then tries to slide out by moving up and down. The original plate for this was shot using a real suitcase with Dan Fogler’s legs sticking into the floor. As the prop suitcase on set was a slightly different size to the one Newt jumps through, it had to be replaced with a full CG suitcase for this scene.

A lot of our work involved removing Dan’s legs via painting and cleaning, as well as rebuilding the floor when the suitcase bounces into the air on top of it. Additional cleaning was required to bend and manipulate Jacob’s arms to convincingly close the scaled-down edges of the CG suitcase. To enhance the realistic look, we added interactive shadows to the environment. The final result required a lot of back and forth between the colour grading, compositing and animation departments. The animations were ultimately driven by the actor’s movements on set, while the compositing artists placed the CG suitcase in the shots. By giving the suitcase more dynamic movements, we gave it the impression of having a will of its own. As there were relatively few suitcase shots, warping and deforming effects in the compositing, supported by some 2D adjustments, allowed us to achieve the final results. Some subtle dust effects with each bounce on the floor gave the weight and impact of the suitcase a convincing feel.

DP: How was the NY environment created?

Andy Morley: A key sequence of our work in this regard was the view from the window of the Goldstein flat over New York City. We created set extensions for this, which consisted of a mix of rendered 3D buildings, projected 3D building details and matte paintings. We created the background using references (texture photos, lidar scans and building photographs) from New York in the 1920s and 1930s. Another CG environment of this type was created for a later situation in the film, in which Newt and Tina stand on the edge of a New York rooftop. The realistic dark night lighting for this sequence, in which the action taking place is still legible, had to be finely balanced. As the scene was filmed entirely in green screen, it took many hours of work before the night-time full CG cityscape behind the actors looked believable.

DP: You were responsible for the entire dinner sequence in the Goldstein flat. How did you realise the self-drying clothes?

Andy Morley: In this sequence, the injured Jacob is brought into the Goldstein flat at the beginning. There, he is startled by clothes on a drying rack that rotate automatically. This was originally filmed as a live-action scene with real clothes on wires. However, the production later decided that the scenes did not look fluid enough and that they should be replaced with CG objects. The design of the clothes horse was also changed to vertical rods. The garments were realised in eight shots using a mix of animation and cloth simulation with Maya and nCloth.

DP: And Queenie’s magic dress that wraps itself around her?

Andy Morley: The full CG dress had to be seamlessly integrated into the environment shots, while the actress wears the real version of the dress in some shots. A believable implementation was complicated because cloth software is usually used to replicate the behaviour of a real-world cloth material. However, this world is a magical one, so Queenie’s dress had to behave unconventionally. Actress Alison Sudol played the scene with the full CG dress in her underwear – the digital dress was animated with a complex Maya rig that allowed for adjustments to the dress to match the movement and realistic deformations in the Cloth simulation. Shape problems could be solved using extensive geometry sculpting. As the real fabric material of the dress did not react particularly well to the real lighting, it was optimised for the final look with a more interesting finish in Nuke.

DP: Then dinner is served – all the ingredients fly through the air, prepare themselves and land on the table. How did you proceed for this sequence?

Andy Morley: An exact choreography was defined for the numerous flying CG objects such as bowls, plates, apples, napkins, cutlery and glass jars. All the objects on the laid table are also full CG. In one shot you can see a jug of cloudy lemonade, the contents of which were not animated with a fluid simulation, but with a deforming effect of the surface. Even the candles are CG, we have complemented them with a manipulated flame element. We also changed the real lighting a little. In particular the one on Jacob to reduce the harshness of the initial lighting on his face – this created an interactive lighting effect. The highlight of the dinner is the apple strudel: all the ingredients swirl around in front of Jacob’s face, the fruit wraps itself in layers of dough before everything is baked to a crispy brown and the cake sinks to the centre of the table, ready to be eaten. We created this shot with customised FX and used Houdini for stronger deformations. The animation was created with Maya, shading was done with Arnold. As we wanted to give the whirlpool a photorealistic look, the team wrote new shaders for it and developed various render-related sequences for the animation of the surface baking in the air. We turned all render settings to 11 for this.

DP: How did the compositing work with the numerous CG elements?

Andy Morley: We realised it with Nuke 9.0v5. Each shot in this sequence required individual 3D models and shaders as well as complex animated textures and displacements. Additional BlendShapes ensured that the overall shape of the pastry could shrink slightly during the baking process; heat distortion effects were added in Nuke. The different objects – some with transparent surfaces with a refraction effect – and the lighting situation on set with many different light sources that had to be recreated in the 3D scene made working on the sequence extremely complex.

DP: How was the collaboration with the other studios involved?

Andy Morley: We shared some shots of the sequence where Newt and Tina are talking on the roof of a New York building with Framestore. Tim Burke was the supervisor for this scene, which was filmed entirely in front of a green screen, and for us it was the last shots for the project in the pipeline. Framestore put Newt’s full CG pet Bowtruckle, called Pickett, on his shoulder, we in turn handed over the 3D layout and lighting setup to Framestore for about half of the shots. Lighting, look and grading were crucial in the edit. We compensated for the lighting in the original plate; the basis for the CG city was a single 3D scene, which was later also used as a digital matte painting and adjusted by the compositors for different camera angles. Double Negative provided us with building assets, which we further developed for the respective shots.

DP: Will you be part of the VFX team again for the next “Fantastic Beast” instalment?

Andy Morley: I really hope so, especially as Cinesite has been involved in all the films based on J.K. Rowling’s books so far. We have a good relationship with the creatives involved in the realisation of the franchise. We would love to help bring more magical effects to the big screen.

Links

“Fantastic Beasts” trailer
youtu.be/Vso5o11LuGU

MPC website
www.moving-picture.com

Cinesite website
www.cinesite.com

Behind the Scenes “Fantastic Beasts”
youtu.be/v00xz7oB3MY

The post So much cattle stuff! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Mirja Fürst.

Rise did a lot of VFX and visual effects studio work at the beginning and in some scenes at the end with the “book thief”: At the beginning, the camera flies through a cloud formation and then lands in a moving train. At the end of the film, Rise made houses explode. Rise has been using Houdini in its pipeline since the Hollywood production “Cloud Atlas” (see also DP issue 02/13) in 2012. Oliver Schulz was responsible for the cloud scene prologue.

DP: What tips do you have for artists to create perfect cumulus clouds?

Oliver Schulz: Many factors are decisive for the right look. Firstly, of course, the shape itself: With cumulus clouds, a basic approach with the distribution of small spheres on a base mesh is certainly not wrong. But the decisive criterion here is the variance in the structure: you should not have uniform edges and create many differently opaque parts. If artists look closely at such clouds, they will realise how many different parts a single cloud contains. The other part is the shading and the light. What a cloud looks like depends on where the light is coming from and how big the water droplets in it are.

DP: Real cloud formations are versatile and multi-faceted. What guidelines did you have to achieve which mood with the clouds at the beginning of the film?

Oliver Schulz: This variety is precisely the difficulty when you want to create a convincing sky in 3D. Basically, our only requirements were that the camera should fly between two layers of clouds at the beginning and that we had to create a seamless transition to the real helicopter plateau with the train in the snowy landscape. At an early stage of production, I did the pre-vis and concept design for our shots. The first step was to create value sketches to develop the general composition, cloud types and lighting moods with our VFX supervisor Florian Gellinger and director Brian Percival. Once it was clear which elements of the design matched the production’s vision, many more concepts followed – this time in colour to further refine the lighting direction and mood. We then projected the concept painting onto geometry in Maya and the camera was blocked out in it. This gave us a relatively precise idea of what the final shot would look like right from the start.

DP: What did your cloud workflow look like step by step?

Oliver Schulz: We did the layout, polygon modelling and animation in Maya. We built the clouds as low-poly geometry so that we could precisely determine the shape of the clouds. We exported the rough geometry from Maya as an Alembic cache and imported it into Houdini. There we converted them into volumes and modified them procedurally. Depending on the type of cloud, we also distributed spheres on the geometry via the cloud node to achieve a “puffier” look. The team then converted the geometries into VDB volumes, which allow a very high voxel resolution. Depending on the type of cloud, this volume was then saved with noise displacement or directly as a .bgeo file. We were then able to use these files in procedural CVex shaders to add finer details. The background of the scene is a projected matte painting.

DP: What are the advantages of Houdini?

Oliver Schulz: The setups can be set up procedurally and it is sufficient to simply replace the input geometry in an existing setup and rewrite the volume. This enables relatively simple and, above all, very fast handling in the event of any changes.

DP: What did you use to render and what settings did you make?

Oliver Schulz: The clouds were rendered in Houdini Mantra. Originally we wanted to raytrace the clouds in PBR mode with HDR Lighting, but we had to abandon this relatively quickly after the first render tests. The render times exploded with so many volumes and were up to 25 hours per frame. As the micropolygon renderer produces a very clean and fast result with volumes, we finally decided in favour of it. The disadvantage is that you can’t render physical light natively with this renderer. However, as the look of clouds is largely based on indirect light and scattering, it was precisely these effects that were important to us.

DP: How did you solve the problem?

Oliver Schulz: With a light setup in which a photon map was generated using simple distant lights with depthmap shadows in PBR mode. This could be read into the shader to be used there as indirect light information in the Micropoplygon renderer. The advantage of this was that effects such as 3DMotionblur are free or even render faster. The final render times were around two to three hours per frame in 2K.

DP: How did you arrive at 3,000 frames in the scene?

Oliver Schulz: The length of the shot was due to the monologue that the narrator gives at the beginning.

DP: What was the resolution of the cloud scene?

Oliver Schulz: We rendered the previews at half resolution in order to keep the render times short for the time being. The final shots were rendered in 2.8K, which corresponded to the delivery format.

DP: How many artists worked on the cloud sequences?

Oliver Schulz: The compositors working on the shots were Oliver Hohn for the first shot and Jonathan Weber for the last shot. I was responsible for 3D and matte painting, with a lot of support from our Houdini TD Simon Ohler.

DP: How long did it take to work on the scenes?

Oliver Schulz: Basically for the entire duration of the production. It was very long at the beginning when we had to set up the 3D scene. Towards the end, we realised the compositing and matte painting. As it always took some time to get feedback from production and the editing room, I had time to work on other shots in parallel during this phase.

DP: What is your opinion on Vue for sky and clouds?

Oliver Schulz: I haven’t worked with it very much yet, but my first impression is that Vue has a very good atmosphere engine that makes it relatively easy to create realistic skies.

DP: Did you also use Houdini to enhance the smoke from the train chimney?

Oliver Schulz: The train was shot from a helicopter, just as it appears in the film. We didn’t add any additional smoke.

DP: And the snow that can be seen in many scenes?

Oliver Schulz: In some shots, the snowfall was enhanced with particle systems from Houdini. Other shots were enhanced with snow using matte painting.

The post Cloudy with a view of Houdini first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Mirja Fürst.

Lavish cinema projects of successful fantasy literature? This is “Ruby Red”, an adaptation of a young adult novel, which was produced from 21 February in Mühlhausen, Eisenach/Wartburg, Weimar, Cologne, Aachen, Jülich, Coburg, Bayreuth and London over 42 days of filming. The film was directed by Felix Fuchssteiner, with DoP Sonja Rom behind the camera. Ruby Red” was shot in 1:2.35 format with the Red Epic. DP spoke to Professor Jürgen Schopper, professor at the Georg Simon Ohm University of Applied Sciences in Nuremberg and long-time consultant at Arri, as well as the VFX producer and VFX supervisor.

The book was on the Spiegel bestseller list for 54 weeks. Over a million copies were sold in Germany alone. It has since been translated into 19 languages. To ensure that the result is also aesthetically pleasing, the VFXs came entirely from Arri Film & TV Services in Cologne.

One of the challenges was to visualise the numerous time jumps of the protagonists from one era to another. There are also two variants of these time jumps: An uncontrolled one, which the heroine has to contend with at the beginning, and then later a controlled one, in which a mysterious blood-activated machine, the chronograph, plays a key role.

DP: Professor Schopper, how did you join the “Ruby Red” production team?

Jürgen Schopper: I supported the project in an advisory capacity with regard to the VFX. I was in talks with Lieblingsfilm GmbH and Robert Marciniak, Philipp Budweg and Thomas Blieninger, who I have known for many films, as well as with mem film GmbH and thus with Felix Fuchssteiner and Katharina Schöde. At that time there was only one script. The subsequent realisation of the VFX work was carried out entirely by Arri Film & TV Services in Cologne.

DP: Mr Warlimont, what was the exact workflow like and how did you adapt the “standard” to “Ruby Red”?

Mortimer Warlimont (Supervisor Visual Effects): We broke new ground by using the so-called linear workflow for the work on “Ruby Red”. This is the innovative colour space standard that was launched by the Technology Committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Science as the ACES system.

The DPX data in logarithmic space previously used as an exchange format is a kind of interim solution. They initially arose from the need to combine digital data (CGI/VFX) with scanned, analogue film material.

Now that almost everything is shot digitally and is actually linear, it makes sense to establish a new colour space that enables a more seamless transition between the data streams to be combined. We have done some pioneering work here with “Ruby Red”.

DP: Mr Schopper, in your opinion, what was the most complex VFX shot and how long did you work on it?

Jürgen Schopper: The highlight of the film from a VFX point of view is the chronograph. A real prop on the outside, digitally enhanced afterwards, the crucial question was how to adequately realise the complicated inner workings that are so important for the plot.

We really did a lot of testing until the aesthetics were right and presented a wide variety of layouts and designs for the director to choose from. The starting point for our deliberations was a pencil sketch by Katharina Schöde.

In the end, we agreed on a crossover of art nouveau with a dash of steampunk aesthetics. Arri’s Head of 3D, Michael Koch, oversaw the months of precision work by the Cologne 3D team, who worked out the complex moving inner workings of the chronograph’s mechanics, including fog and particle clouds, in full CG.

DP: The “smoke hand” at the end was composed of particles. Mr Koch, do you see a trend towards VFX made from emitting objects?

Michael Koch (Arri Head of 3D): The fact that the evil count’s “nebulous” hand strangles the heroine with smoky fingers was already in the script. Of course it’s true that 3D particle animation systems are getting better and better and are being used more and more, but I wouldn’t call it a trend.

DP: Mr Schopper, to what extent were you and your team involved in the design? How did you develop the effects from the original book?

Jürgen Schopper: All the visual effects were developed in consultation with the director and production team. That’s the fun of it! It starts with pencil sketches that eventually become digital layouts. We then check whether the design approach is suitable for all the shot sizes in the film. The design then flows into the VFX workflow as a reference and finally becomes part of the film.

DP: Ms Müller, as a German youth film, “Ruby Red” can’t keep up with Hollywood blockbusters in terms of budget. What advice can you give young filmmakers on how to stay within budget when it comes to VFXs?

Katja Müller (VFX Producer): Of course, the budget ultimately determines the amount and complexity of VFX work. Digital image design is not a business with endless room for negotiation. Nevertheless, the most important thing for a production is to seek advice at an early stage, i.e. long before shooting.

Precise storyboards and a precise shot-based cost calculation are essential. Of course, we then offer set supervision during filming and only then do we actually enter the post-production phase.

However, if the preparations have been taken into account accordingly, there will certainly be no cost explosion when creating the VFX for the production.

DP: Mr Warlimont, do you see a difference to European or international productions?

Mortimer Warlimont (Supervisor Visual Effects): No, based on my experience with international productions, I don’t see any difference here. You pull together to make a good film.

DP: The film was shot on historical locations in places. What problems does this create for the visual effects?

Mortimer Warlimont: With historical locations, you always have a big responsibility on the filming side. For “Ruby Red”, a special lighting setup was actually necessary, which protruded into the motif and was digitally replaced afterwards. In the Wartburg in Thuringia, a huge cushion of light covered almost the entire ceiling, which was then shot in an extra plate.

DP: Mrs Müller, the set extensions for the time jumps were quite extensive.

Katja Müller (VFX Producer): Yes, that’s right. Basically, historical photographs, paintings or engravings are a good reference for historical buildings.

DP: Thanks to your work on the films “The Pope” and “The Countess”, do you already have a library at hand that is conveniently filled with buildings from different eras?

Katja Müller: Yes, but unfortunately you can only use an existing library of 3D buildings to a very limited extent. Every new film is a new challenge and has different requirements to the previous project. The parameters of era, location or even the level of detail required within a VFX shot are never the same.

The post Rubinrote VFX first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.