Cold Storage is a 2026 horror comedy feature directed by Jonny Campbell from a screenplay by David Koepp, adapted from his 2019 novel. The film is a France–United States co-production principally financed and produced by STUDIOCANAL with Pariah, and distributed by STUDIOCANAL in Europe.

It stars Georgina Campbell as Naomi Williams and Joe Keery as Travis “Teacake” Meacham, two night-shift employees at a self-storage facility built atop an abandoned U.S. military base, whose world becomes a nightmare when a parasitic fungus sealed deep underground is released. The story combines elements of body horror, dark comedy, creature effects and outbreak survival as the protagonists race to contain the rapidly mutating organism before it causes widespread devastation.

Nikolas D’Andrade (Linkedin | Site | IMDB) is VFX Supervisor at MPC Paris, the studio responsible for delivering all 575 VFX shots on Cold Storage. Prior to Cold Storage, his screen credits include Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet), Guns Akimbo, and Borderlands. He is also credited as VFX supervisor on Mortal and won the Danish Robert Award for Best Visual Effects for The Shadow in My Eye.

Béatrice Bauwens (LinkedIn | IMDB) is Head of VFX and Post Production at MPC Paris and is credited on projects including Rust and Bone, Tell No One, and Emilia Pérez. In addition to studio leadership, MPC Paris’ recent filmography includes work on The Last Duel, Under Paris, The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, and The Nun 2.

DP: “Cold Storage” is not exactly a casual weekend gig. How did you end up on this one?

Nikolas D’Andrade : I had joined MPC Paris a few months after returning from Montreal, right after finishing Anatomy of a Fall, directed by Justine Triet. This was three years ago. Béatrice Bauwens, our Head of VFX & Post Production, needed someone with experience on mid- to large-scale features with U.S. clients, and I was fortunate to be assigned to the project. The production moved very quickly – I even did an urgent 24-hour round trip to Ouarzazate, Morocco, for a technical scout. 

Béatrice Bauwens: France is especially attractive for VFX production, thanks to a highly advantageous tax credit system. Productions can benefit from a 30% tax rebate on expenses incurred in France, starting at €250,000 in local spending. For projects with over €2 million in VFX spend within France, the tax credit increases to 40%. This financial incentive, combined with the presence of highly skilled and creative artists, makes France a leading destination for VFX work. This was decisive for Cold Storage in deciding on France for the VFX work. 

Combined with MPC Paris’s extensive experience on major international features and series, our production capacity, and the strength and diversity of our reel, MPC became a natural and strategic choice for the project. 

DP: MPC Paris, back in action. What did it feel like to have the logo on the door again after the Technicolor era imploded?

Béatrice Bauwens: Technically speaking MPC Paris never ceased its activity. MPC Paris was lucky to keep full activity in France while many other MPC offices around the world were facing disruptions. At the end of March, TransPerfect Group acquired MPC Paris as well as The Mill Paris. This period has been truly unique for all of us. We received tremendous support from the entire industry, and the team was fully committed to giving it the best possible chance of success. We were extremely fortunate to have been acquired, enabling us to retain the majority of our team in France. 

MPC Paris has always been deeply rooted in French cinema, with over 40 years of experience on local productions going back to the Mikros Image days. What hasn’t changed is the drive of our teams and the quality of the work we deliver; the two remain at the core of MPC Paris. 

DP: For people who only know the film as “that slime movie”: what was MPC Paris actually responsible for?

Nikolas D’Andrade : Everything was produced by MPC Paris, from on-set data capture all the way through to the DCP. We handled the assets, environments, prep, compositing, and more. Creatively, Cold Storage was a true challenge, covering the entire VFX spectrum: from basic rig cleanup to full environment destruction, creatures, digital set extensions, and the enhancement of practical SFX makeup. 

The distribution of work over time and across MPC teams was particularly complex. With the edit constantly evolving, the VFX departments were tightly interconnected: creatures, environments, destruction, compositing. Every narrative change had cross-cutting impacts, so the teams needed careful coordination and a high level of flexibility throughout production. 

DP: How many humans did it take to manufacture this much biological unpleasantness?

Nikolas D’Andrade : We split work mainly between Paris and Bangalore, and all in all, around 500 people contributed to the project – not all at once, but across the different phases. From a production standpoint, Cold Storage was set up to be highly collaborative and flexible. A core production and supervision team kept things on track, supported by leads across assets, animation, FX, environments, lighting, and compositing. This structure let us respond quickly to post-production needs, test screenings, and ongoing creative tweaks.  

Big international projects always involve a lot of creative voices, and Cold Storage was no exception – producers, supervisors, the director, STUDIOCANAL, and the U.S. producers were all closely involved, sparking frequent artistic discussions and iterations. The whole process ran on strong collaboration, shared creative drive, and a single goal: pushing the film’s quality as far as we could. 

DP: Give us the boring-but-essential part: what did the pipeline look like on this show?

Nikolas D’Andrade : We had an excellent production team – three VFX producers, a truly outstanding PM, and coordinators who were proactive, efficient, and a joy to work with. They kept work distribution, tracking, and cross-department communication running smoothly. It may sound obvious, but it’s worth saying: the production team plays a more-than-essential role – without them, the machine doesn’t run. And of course, the artists made it all happen, giving it everything they had. Huge thanks to the whole team. 

On the technical side, our process kicked off with modeling, building creatures, CG doubles, environments, and all fully CG assets. We then moved into texturing with Adobe Substance Painter, Substance Designer, and Mari, which let us handle assets smoothly and non-destructively. Lookdev came next, shaping materials, shading, and lighting in Maya and Arnold, while FX lookdev in Houdini with Arnold set the tone for dynamic elements. Fully CG sequences – the explosion, the opening timewarp, macro shots inside veins and the brain, and the late-arriving cockroach sequence – each brought their own challenges, tackled as they entered the pipeline.  

At the heart of it, MPC Paris relies on a pipeline honed over the years and shared with The Mill Paris, built around Arnold, Maya, Houdini and Nuke. This blend of trusted workflows and smart custom solutions let the teams stay nimble while delivering complex sequences to the highest standard. 

It was also on this project that we were able to launch the development of a workflow manager prototype, which allowed us to automate entire sections of our production chain. This prototype has since been merged with our flagship open-source software, Meshroom.

DP: You were on set. What is your mental checklist before you sign off on plates and walk to the VFX suite?

Nikolas D’Andrade: I don’t handle data capture myself, I have a dedicated person or team for that. There are a few reasons: First, I need to stay constantly next to the director, the DP, or the 1st AD to control what’s happening. Even on shots that, at first glance, aren’t supposed to be VFX. It’s often exactly in those cases that you need to be there, because things can quickly impact the budget, like shots that weren’t planned in the bid.

Second, it’s simply logistical: when we change setups, that’s when a lot of creative and technical discussion happens between the director and the DP (and sometimes other departments). I can’t afford not to be there because I’m busy taking measurements or photos.

I’m also there as an authority figure during certain captures (HDRIs for example), to make sure nobody moves on set while the wrangler team is shooting the HDR. I ask my team to note certain things in the VFX report that might help us later, or that will require discussion during the edit (continuity, extra work, or creative input).

On my side, I write a daily VFX LOG, a shot-by-shot journal of what we shot the day before, which I then send to the producer and the VFX producer, so I can flag any complications that will require additional work, or, on the contrary, confirm that everything went as planned.

DP: What’s in your on-set bag of tricks these days, besides gaffer tape and quiet despair?

Nikolas D’Andrade : Personally, I have my iPad with me so I can draft/paint over things to show or discuss specific points with the director, along with the screenplay, the VFX breakdown, and the day’s call sheet/work plan provided by the 1st AD the day before. I also carry my walkie-talkie so I’m in constant contact with my wrangler team.

For the wranglers on set: the usual kit. ColorChecker, chrome/grey balls, a laser distance meter, tape measures, a stills camera with different focal lengths – I usually ask for a CPL filter to cut reflections on polarized materials such as water and other shiny surfaces, except metal, so we can provide references and textures with as less lighting interference as possible, plus LiDAR.

DP: Tooling question, but make it spicy: what’s new in the MPC toolbox now that you’re inside the TransPerfect umbrella?

Béatrice Bauwens: Tooling-wise, moving into the TransPerfect Group didn’t mean starting from scratch. Under Technicolor, we had a massive global toolbox across MPC Paris, The Mill, Mikros Animation and Technicolor Games, and that legacy came with us when we joined TransPerfect. A good example is Meshroom, which still powers a lot of our workflows.  On top of that, TransPerfect DNA is about technology. This is a perfect place for us to land with great opportunity to innovate and find the smartest technical and human solutions for filmmakers… Cold Storage gave us the perfect playground to test new techniques, strengthen the studio, and keep raising the bar. 

DP: Roughly how many shots were “normal”, and how many were “this needs a hazmat suit”?

Nikolas D’Andrade : We delivered 575 shots in total. Roughly 300 were “invisible” VFX such set extension, makeup enhancement, while the more “hazmat suit” work broke down to about 175 slime/fungus shots, 60 creature shots, and 23 explosion shots.

DP: Slime is a liar. How did you keep viscosity, weight, and stickiness from drifting into videogame goo?

Nikolas D’Andrade : The process was long, but honestly very cool to develop. My very first step, right after our early pre-production discussions with director Jonny Campbell, was to read David Koepp’s novel to find details that can be useful but are sometimes hard to convey in a screenplay because of format limitations. David writes hard sci-fi, grounded in scientific and physical principles (which I personally love, authors like Carl Sagan with Contact, or Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy).

In the novel, we learn how this cordyceps “evolves” depending on the chemical elements it encounters and absorbs. It mutates and evolves into an increasingly intelligent entity, constantly trying to spread further. That became our starting point for giving personality to what is essentially the film’s antagonist. For example, its favourite molecule, its holy grail, is water, and its worst nightmare is fire. There’s a shot, a top shot, where we designed the fungus shape on the tarmac after a vehicle explosion: a dead zone in a circular shape, because it’s too hot for it to get close.

From there, we worked closely with the FX team and entered an R&D phase. We needed an asset, something we could almost “release” into a 3D scene and let it live its life, the way a cordyceps would, but at the same time, because we know the constraints and reality of working with production constraints, such as framing, we still needed control over its propagation so we could design it shot by shot.

We also asked ourselves very practical questions: how does it get through a gap? And we established rules like: it spreads faster or slower depending on the surface, if it’s water, it spreads extremely fast. That’s why in the parking-lot scene after Dr. Friedman’s implosion, the parking is almost completely covered within just a few shots, whereas in the storage facility it progresses much more slowly.

For lookdev, we went through a lot of back-and-forth to find what felt best. The original brief was a fluorescent green, but we ended up moving toward a more vegetal green, testing options like verdigris tones or even black. I personally liked the black because it added a more threatening feel, but it leaned too much into a Venom-style symbiote vibe and also created readability issues in darker moments.

DP: Who paid the price for the slime? How did you split the work across departments, and how many iterations did it take before everyone stopped wincing?

Nikolas D’Andrade : All departments were involved constantly, because whenever we did a new iteration, say we or the client felt the fungus was moving too much in a shot for instance. We had to adjust the asset parameters inside the shot, re-sim, re-export the Alembics, re-render, and then update the comps. The FX team was by far the most relied-upon, because they “owned the recipe” and knew how to cook it. They did a fantastic job, by the end we genuinely had a real digital cordyceps asset.

DP: Before this film, did you know what a rat king was, or were you blissfully untraumatised?

Nikolas D’Andrade : Yes. I’d heard about it a long time ago, but to me it was basically an urban legend. During my pre-production research, especially after reading a 2006 white paper from the Natural History Museum / University of Tartu in Estonia. I realised it’s probably not just a legend, but a real (and very rare) phenomenon.

The director had initially sent me a photo he found online, and from there I tracked down more images. Even so, we ended up doing the concepts largely from scratch. If you’re curious, here’s the paper I’m referring to:

Miljutin, Andrei. (2007). Rat kings in Estonia. Proc Estonian Acad Sci Biol Ecol. 56.

DP: Cats have infinite internet references. Deer have nature documentaries. Rat kings are rare and appear mostly in nightmares. How did you even start designing and animating that thing? 

Nikolas D’Andrade : Based on the concepts and the photos we found, the brief we received was that the tail knot was the epicentre, almost like a python pinned into the concrete floor. As a result, each rat is trying to pull in a different direction, but they’re all restrained by that fixed point, like a dog trying to attack you while tied to a pole.

To make it properly disgusting, we used two types of rats assets: “hero” rats and “extra” rats. The main pile of rats, positioned in the lower part, was the “mass”, inert and animated in a soft-body / simulation approach, has been made with “extra” rats, while the hero rats were placed on top and animated in keyframes. Once everything was assembled, we poured slime over it. The complexity of that shot was collisions: between the volume of the rat geometry, the thickness of the fur, and the slime on top. It was pretty intense to manage all the collision interactions.

DP: Finale time. There’s a big bang at the end. What was the brief, and what did you need to sell to make it feel real?

Nikolas D’Andrade : The creative intent was very simple: an underground nuclear explosion that collapses the entire environment over a radius of a few kilometres. To achieve that, I asked production for a drone so we could mount the camera (ARRI Alexa) and shoot plates and “tile” the environment, both to camera-map certain areas and to get wide establishing coverage. We also used maps to rebuild the terrain topology beyond a certain distance, especially elevation data, and LiDAR for everything close to camera.

We had a very long previs/postvis phase because the sequence was originally intended to be only a few shots, but production decided to extend it to increase the intensity. It’s the film’s climax, so you want it to hit hard, so there was a lot of back-and-forth with editorial to find the right action narrative and timing.

It was a challenge because the volume was enormous. We had to cluster the work by zones, manage all the collisions with trees, and stack layers of volumetric fluid, etc. The key for me was contrast ratio: using the light emanating from the ground cracks created by the explosion to naturally build a chiaroscuro lighting that’s immediately flattering and readable. And then adding debris and atmospheric particles to create depth and fill the volume.

DP: Was that mostly simulation FX, mostly comp, or the usual unholy marriage of both?

Nikolas D’Andrade : FX, elements, and plates, all cleverly blended together by our great comp team.

DP: Your favourite shot, and be honest: was it because it looked great, or because it finally stopped breaking?

Nikolas D’Andrade : There are several shots I’m really fond of. Early in the film, when they find the first body: the ribcage is open and the skull collapses in CG. the CG/asset work is genuinely strong, and I find the shots aesthetically beautiful from a photographic point of view.

The “Garbage” shot (Lujza Richter) when she turns around on Level -2, and you can see the wall behind her through her eye sockets, crafted with love by one of our best CG artists, André Monteiro.

The “Ironhead” shot (Andrew Brooke) lying on the ground after being shot as well, for the same reasons, with the blood spreading across the floor, I really like that one.

Another shot I think is very successful is a totally invisible one you can spot in the breakdown: it’s a full-CG shot of the camera moving forward in a travelling move toward a storage unit with the door closed, while the bikers are pounding on it. It was seamless, and I love that.

DP: What’s next for MPC Paris?

Béatrice Bauwens: We’re incredibly proud to share that Lise Fischer and the MPC Paris teams won the César for Best Visual Effects for L’Inconnu de la Grande Arche. It’s a wonderful recognition of the talent, creativity and collaboration that drive our studio every day, and we’re still celebrating this beautiful moment together. 

In the coming months, a bunch of exciting projects are set to hit screens: we delivered 150 VFX for the new AppleTV+ series The Hunt by Cédric Anger, 138 shots for The Gallerist by Cathy Yan, and 165 shots for Les rayons et les ombres by Xavier Gianolli. 

Beyond that, our supervisors are deep in development on several other projects and on set, though for now we can’t spill the details but stay tuned 😊 

We stay passionate and inventive, always exploring new techniques and large-scale approaches. Cold Storage gave us the perfect playground to keep building the studio, test new methods, and strengthen our capabilities. We’ll be at Cannes Film Festival this year with some projects already in consideration, continuing to experiment, learn, and push our craft forward. 

The post MPC’s Cold Storage first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

A Quarter-Century of Digital Clay

The ZBrush Summit 2025 Virtual Edition runs from 7 to 9 November 2025, celebrating 25 years of ZBrush. Hosted by Maxon, the event streams globally via ZBrush Live, Twitch and YouTube. It marks a dual milestone: a decade of the live Sculpt-Off competition and a quarter-century of the digital sculpting software that reshaped 3D character creation across film, games and design.

The online format, introduced during the pandemic years, remains. No travel, no queues — only three days of streamed presentations, artist showcases and production-level tips.

Friday: Legends Return to the Arena

The Summit opens with the Past Competitors LIVE ZBrush Sculpt-Off. Over fifty artists from the competition’s first decade, including Maarten Verhoeven, Zhelong Xu, Ashley Adams and Christian Carranza, have been invited back for a three-hour speed-sculpt challenge.

That’s followed by the Public LIVE Sculpt-Off, an open competition judged on creativity and execution under time pressure. Both contests reinforce what has become the Summit’s defining spectacle: sculptors creating original work live, in front of a global audience.

Saturday: Practice, Process and Production

Day Two runs from 9:00 to 18:00 PST, starting with Robson Barros from Loot Studios discussing Creating 3D Printable Miniatures That Tell Stories. His live ZBrush demo focuses on scale readability, pose design and physical durability for tabletop models.

Ryan Kingslien, who helped define early ZBrush anatomy training, revisits Beyond Reference, a session on form interpretation and sculptural anatomy. Daniel Hahn (Daytoner) then offers a production-focused look at hard-surface workflows used in toy and concept model creation.

Marko Lazov follows with live creature design improvisation under Turning Chaos Into Creatures. Przemyslaw Malachowski demonstrates Designing Tattoos in 3D, showing how sculpting tools can map artwork precisely to body anatomy.

The evening concludes with WeFX detailing ZBrush use on Wednesday Season 2 for Netflix. Team members Brandon Golding, Carlos Jacinto, Cesar Dacol Jr, Mauro Matheus and Sam Javanrouh break down their creature and prop work before the traditional “Good-Byes” close the stream.

Sunday: Studios, Toys and Technical Futures

The final day begins with Jordi Cerdà Gaya presenting 15 Years Using ZBrush and Crafting 3D Models by Natural Intelligence, a reflection on freelance product modelling and digital craftsmanship.

A highlight session follows from ID Software (Denzil O’Neill, Jason Martin and Solomon Gaitan) showing how ZBrush contributed to asset creation for Doom The Dark Ages.

Matt Hilton from Hasbro takes the stage for Making Joe, revealing the sculpt-to-production process for the G.I. Joe Classified Series. Mitchel Wu then reframes digital sculpting from a photographer’s perspective in The Second Life of a Subtool, tracing the journey from ZBrush mesh to practical miniature sets.

Later segments include Patrick 4D’s short presentation, followed by the Maxon Development Team previewing upcoming features and a 2026 roadmap. Details of these “exciting features” were not yet disclosed at press time.

The Summit concludes with the LIVE Sculpt-Off Winners Announcement, crowning champions from both the public and invitational events before a final farewell.

Looking Back – and Ahead

First released in 1999, ZBrush has become a cornerstone of digital production pipelines and earned a 2014 Scientific and Engineering Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for its multi-resolution sculpting system. The 25th anniversary Summit blends that heritage with a forward look. For production artists, the sessions promise practical insights across sculpting, concept art, collectibles, and VFX asset creation.

Maxon – ZBrush Summit 2025 Virtual Edition

The post Sculpt-Offs, Anniversaries & Anatomy: ZBrush Summit 2025 celebrates 25 years first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

In nuce: The BBC (British Broadcast Corporation) has released a ten-minute Behind the Scenes video for the third season of the series His Dark Materials; the video focuses on the creature effects of the series season and is entitled “Populating the Worlds”.

In toto: The series is based on the three-part series of novels ( The Golden Compass, The Magic Knife, The Amber Telescope) by British author Philip Pullmann; the books deal with the dangers of dogmatic religiosity in an exciting fictional way. In the video, actors Ruth Wilson, Amir Wilson and James McAvoy talk about what it’s like to work with puppeteers on a film set. Visual effects supervisor Russell Dodgson (Framestore) also has his say; Dodgson talks about the ever-growing challenges for his team – from season to season of His Dark Materials. Executive Producer and Production Designer Joel Collins ( The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Black Mirror, London Has Fallen) asks how it was possible to transfer the complete bestiary from Philip Pullmann’s original book into the series adaptation. Creature FX supervisor Brian Fisher also provides insights into the puppetry of the animal ensemble.

Click to continue: “So much animal stuff!” was also featured in our retro article by Mirja Fürst on 27.07.2022 . An in-depth expert discussion with Cinesite supervisor Andy Morley about the first part of the Harry Potter film Fantastic Beasts.

Bringing the creatures of Series 3 to life – Behind the Scenes | His Dark Materials – BBC

The post His Dark Materials | Featurette first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

As with “Jurassic Park”, ILM was of course the studio responsible. The team was supported by Image Engine, Hybride and Ghost VFX, among others. A good twenty years later, CG dinosaurs were once again drawing audiences to cinemas in their droves: With 208 million on its first opening weekend, the film achieved the best box office result of all time and even surpassed “The Avengers”.

During filming, real dinosaur models were used as references – primarily the heads of the animals with which the actors interacted. These were created by Legacy Effects, which was founded more than twenty years ago by “Jurassic Park” artist Stan Winston. While numerous animatronics were used in “Jurassic Park”, only one was used in “Jurassic World”, in the scene with the dying Apatosaurus. This was used as a tribute to Winston’s special effects artistry; Legacy created this giant animatronic in an elaborate process lasting around three months. The optimal lighting and texture references provided by the animatronics in “Jurassic Park” are one of the main reasons why the effects of the 22-year-old film are still convincing today – in comparison with other works from the time.

Image Engine from Vancouver created around 280 VFX shots for “Jurassic World”, 200 of which were shots with the four raptors Blue, Charlie, Delta and Echo. Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) trains the velociraptors in the film by conditioning them; they are around 4 metres long and 2 metres high. There is no palaeontological evidence that these animals once actually existed in this size. The depiction of them as highly intelligent hunting animals is also controversial at best. Image Engine realised the arena scenes with the training of the animals, the scenes in which their heads are in the fixation of the boxes and the chase in the jungle, in which the team also implemented the CG environment. Image Engine also helped ILM with the raptors in the final fight scene. In total, 120 Image Engine artists worked on the project for almost 11 months. The animation of the raptors in particular was very complex due to the many small nuances in the movement that were required for the realism of the dinosaurs. VFX supervisor Martyn Culpitt from Image Engine told us about the work on “Jurassic World” and revealed how the legendary VFX print of “Jurassic Park” influenced the team’s work.

DP: How did you come to work on the dinosaur project?

Martyn Culpitt: We’ve worked with ILM on a few feature films before, most recently on “Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles”. ILM asked me to be the VFX supervisor for Image Engine on “Jurassic World”. As “Jurassic Park” is one of my favourite films, I was very excited to be involved.

DP: What was your pipeline like for a project of this scale?

Martyn Culpitt: Our pipeline has been around for a while and we work on it continuously. So we didn’t have to rebuild anything for “Jurassic World”. Our in-house, self-developed asset system called Jabuka allowed us to track all assets through every department, which is absolutely necessary for a project of this size in order to work efficiently. For Jurassic World, we used a lot of bundles in Jabuka so we could track all the assets and files used in a shot and make sure all the data was correct throughout the shot process. This allowed us to work efficiently and keep the project on track.

DP: What other tools were there?

Martyn Culpitt: We also used Shotgun for our dailies, shot details and production. We built our pipeline so that we could pull a lot of information from the database. Another tool that is important for our workflow was built by the lighting department: the node-based lighting tool Caribou. Before “Jurassic World”, we had already tested it in an early beta version on projects, and this is the first time we have used it in a full version. Caribou is based on our open source project Gaffer, which was started by John Haddon; David Minor developed it into a Maya plug-in together with our R&D team. This enabled us to manage full CG environments, characters, effects and props in the complex lighting scenes incredibly well. With Caribou, the lighting of the full CG shots was much faster and we were able to transfer templates to shots much more easily. The R&D team spent a lot of time optimising the lighting workflow, which gave the artists a lot of freedom to be creative.

DP: Did you exchange assets with ILM?

Martyn Culpitt: ILM gave us a lot of assets: The raptor models and textures, the Apatosaurus as well as a bunch of foliage and lots of other bits and pieces. We adapted our shaders to match those of the ILM models. The raptors in particular often changed their look and characteristics during the course of the project, including the models and textures. Every time ILM gave us updates, we also had to update our scenes. ILM has a very strict naming and texturing convention; we used scripts to adapt our workflow to their specifications so that the exchange went smoothly.

DP: Did you also work on shots with other studios?

Martyn Culpitt: Hybride did some of the backgrounds that we used the raptors in. In a few scenes we also used holograms of Hybride, which we layered over the raptors – the studio sent us various layers and nuke scripts to help us put them together.

DP: How important was the look of “Jurassic Park” for you? What specific references did you use?

Martyn Culpitt: The first “Jurassic Park” film was the first stop in collecting references. We kept comparing our work to certain key scenes from the old film to make sure we matched the cinematic tension and movement of the dinosaurs from the original. We used the herd behaviour of the Gallimimus dinosaurs in the original as a benchmark for our Gallimimus shot. The scene in “Jurassic Park” when the raptors chase the children through the kitchen and entrance area was our reference for the posing of the raptors in the training arena. we watched “Jurassic Park 2 and 3” once for inspiration, but didn’t use either scene as a reference.

DP: How did you go about creating the raptors?

Martyn Culpitt: In terms of the physicality and locomotion of the raptors, Director Colin Trevorrow and ILM Animation Supervisor Glen McIntosh were very keen to make the dinos look believable and our team used animals from the real world as a guideline: For the leg movement we mainly studied ostriches and emus, from lions and tigers we adapted the predatory behaviour and for alligators, lizards and ravens the focus was on specific characteristics such as head movements, jaw snapping, eye blinking and tail movements. From a performance point of view, the shots with the training of the animals in the arena were complex, because we had to show that the raptors were vicious and scary, but at the same time thoughtful and intelligent. It was also the first time the raptors were shown on film, so we wanted to portray their characters properly and not make them look like just any four dinosaurs. We found that for their performance, less is more and the emotions could not be exaggerated. Videos of animals fighting and stalking provided a solid foundation as a guide – lions in particular, when they just stand and stare at their prey before attacking, are hugely intimidating. Capturing this look and the silence before the attack for the raptors helped to create the tension and emotion for the sequence.

DP: How was motion capture used for the animals?

Martyn Culpitt: With motion capture, we captured the beat of the story from each shot; the footage helped us find the shot composition and general movement. The motion capture data was great as a first blocking pass – it gave us a complete sequence quickly and ensured we could tell the story to the director’s vision before we started the time-consuming work on the final animation. This saved a lot of time. The biggest challenge with this approach, however, was to transfer the motion capture data with the movements of humans to a raptor with its size, weight and speed and to adapt the data to an extreme degree. The numerous animal references helped with the development of the movement, after which we spent a lot of time giving each individual raptor its thinking, intelligence and specific character traits. Once we had a lock on the animation, we added the muscles, skin sliding and the trembling of the muscles and tendons, which was crucial for the animalistic features and realism of the creature.

DP: How did the lighting and compositing for the raptors work?

Martyn Culpitt: These steps played a big part in the realism of the animals. We worked out the details of the raptors very finely and also added lots of subtle FX elements to the environment such as dust, flying bugs, wood shavings and dirt. Sometimes the original plates didn’t make the raptors really stand out because they were very well lit. In these cases, we adjusted the lighting of the VFX shots so that it differed from the lighting of the real plates – so it usually looked much better.

DP: Which set extension was the most complicated for you and why?

Martyn Culpitt: Adding the jungle to the plates was the most challenging because the CG plants had to integrate seamlessly with the real ones, as did the other aspects of the environment such as fog, volumes and light beams. We invested a lot of time in the look development of the CG plants and their ambient lighting to ensure they matched the filmed plants in the plate. The full CG environments were also complicated, but once we had nailed the look of the filmed plates, the full CG shots were quite easy to create. One of our biggest concerns was that we would have to simulate thousands of leaves individually as the raptors passed through, so we thought carefully about how to proceed beforehand – simulating all the leaves per raptor was not an option.

DP: What did you do?

Martyn Culpitt: We ended up with a library solution with pre-simulated plants: Each had different directions of impact to the left or right side, in the centre, upwards, or the whole plant was moved. We simulated the plants for longer than necessary, so we could change the timing in the scene and achieve many variations. We first created complete jungle layouts for the shots with all the plants we needed in the scene. Then we replaced the static plants with the simulated ones based on the walk path of the raptor animation. A few times the same plant interacted with two raptors, which we then simulated completely. We also replaced plants that were very close to the camera with fully simulated ones. As we were able to use the same simulation for some plants, this saved a lot of time and memory.

DP: Which tool did you use to generate the 3D plant models?

Martyn Culpitt: Most of the plant models started with Speedtree, then we modified them and refined the look development and modelling to make them all look the way we needed them to. ILM gave us some leaf assets, but as they had to match the movements of the raptors, we recreated and rigged them. For the layout of the scene, we used a custom-built flexible system that reads complex assets, creates a preview of them and uses very little cache in Maya. The plant models had a size between 50,000 and 200,000 polygons, the trees even had up to half a million polygons. Our system allows us to preview these assets with a lot of additional information as full geometry, proxy models or simply as bounding boxes. This makes it easier for us to organise sets with over 10,000 plants while still being able to see fine details. The set can either be populated using Python tools or manually with the preview caches. The transformation values and the links to the associated assets are stored in a reference file, which only instantiates the high-resolution assets during rendering.

DP: How big was the jungle file in the end?

Martyn Culpitt: The base data wasn’t particularly large because we often duplicated the same plants, which was partly to do with how our layout system works. In total we had about 20 to 30 different plants including trees, lianas, plants and grass clumps. The texture data was also small because a relatively low resolution was sufficient and we decided against working with Mari for this reason. The final layout was very large, but the possibility of instantiation allowed us to reduce the amount of memory required for the render.

DP: How did you texturise and shade to achieve a realistic natural look?

Martyn Culpitt: We tried to be clever during the look development as we didn’t have any special tools to realise this. The entire jungle had a standardised look development with one shader and the same texture library. The jungle setup was based on an exact structure arrangement of the plants, naming convention of the objects and creation of the UVs so that we could place the correct texture and shader. We calibrated all the plant textures together, so there was no discrepancy when using different plant models. The management of the jungle was very straightforward, we didn’t have any significant extra work in terms of textures or shaders. The lighting of the night situation in particular ensured that we didn’t have to be overly careful when texturing and shading. We also used the same setup in some of the daytime shots and it worked reasonably well there too.

DP: How was the jungle lit?

Martyn Culpitt: The lighting was created with a normal environment HDRI setup and additional lights with gobos. Numerous spotlights placed in the scene created beams of light that shone through the leaves. It was a mix of actual geo shadows and texture gobos. We also created lights just for the guidance of the fog. In cases where the character key light didn’t work in the fog, we duplicated it and adjusted it to make the fog and light beams look better. We had a lot of plate references – but it took us a long time to hit them in the look development scenes, which we could then hand over to the lighting artists to adapt their specific shots.

DP: Which VFX scene was the most challenging and why?

Martyn Culpitt: A difficult scene was the Gallimimus shot for a variety of reasons. This shot was one of the first we worked on and also one of the last. The main reason for this was because we initially assumed that there would only be eight to ten characters. During production, however, there were more and more and in the end there were 60 dinosaurs running through the picture. If we had known at the beginning that there would be such a large number, we would have approached the shot differently, for example with a crowd tool. But as we had started the shot with keyframe animation, we simply increased the number of characters with each revision and adapted our layout and the animation to the higher number accordingly. From a rendering point of view, the shot was complex due to its length and extremely many layers – every single Gallimimus dino with its associated effects including stereo conversion – and fast iterations were time-consuming.

DP: There are also a few mutated animals in the film. Where did the inspiration for these come from?

Martyn Culpitt: Before we could start work, we had to decide what they would look like. I developed some interesting concept ideas with our concept artist Rob Jensen, which we showed to the director and ILM. These were then used to finalise the look. For the mutated animals, the team shot real animals, we just augmented and edited them in the plate: Fur on one, one arm to another or another tail. Only the snake was a full CG replacement, as it has two heads. In terms of animation, we only had to orientate ourselves on the real models, so the animation work was manageable.

Links

– Imagine Engine Studio Tour
– Jurassic World Breakdown Reel

The post Back in Dinoland first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: As part of our weekly recurring series “Animago Afternoon”, we present pearls, gems and other splendours from last year’s Animago film festivals at the best time of the afternoon. This time, salvaged from the Animago archives in 2019, we show you the awesome short film “400 MPH”, realised by graduates of the VFX university “Supinfocom” – with branches in France and India.

What is “400 MPH” about? Let us quote from our interview with the film team, published in DP 06:2019– not a bit self-centred: “When was the last time you identified with an animal? And not in a “I want to sleep all day like my cat” kind of way, no, when was the last time you identified with an animal in a meaningful way? Probably in one of the Planet of the Apes remakes?”, was our opening line at the time, because in “400 MPH” the ape is your favourite!

Ancient myths in a monkey’s fur: in the short film “400 MPH”, the foppish title hero is on the trail of Greek myths: the film’s plot about flying high and speed fanaticism is inspired by the story of Icarus.

The makers behind it: The creative minds behind this rousing short film are: Julia Chaix (CG Generalist at Ubisoft), Alice Lefort (Set & Animation Production Manager at Illumination Mac Guff), Lorraine Desserre (Rigging TD at Eisko), Natacha Pianeti (VFX Artist at Untold Studios) and Quentin Tireloque (3D Animator at Stratosphere Games). As you can see: The former Supinfocom students have found a professional home.

Click further: The short film, which (it feels like) breaks the sound barrier, is linked below in full length. We say: film off – and don’t go to the centre of the sun! Find out more about the educational programme at rubika-edu.com .

400MPH | Court-Métrage | RUBIKA Animation 2019

The post 400 MPH | Animago Afternoon first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: In this VFX breakdown, Cinesite shows you how to tame a duo of basilisks (which in The Witcher look like a cross between a Jurassic Park raptor and a snake) with the weapons of the VFXs. Incidentally, the effects were created for the final episode of the second season. The episode in question is entitled “Family”.

What’s behind the effects? The team at Cinesite spent a whole year developing the look of the terrifying basilisks. They were modelled on numerous real-world animals and their anatomies. The particular challenge was to give the basilisk’s surface a mixture of fur, feathers and scales that looked natural – a real Herculean task for the creature designers! Cinesite also had to harmonise the fight choreography of the actors, who tumbled around in front of the cameras on set, with the movements of the animated basilisks.

More for Witcher fans: If you want to find out what Platige Image conjured up for the first series season, read our illuminating interview with Visual Effects Supervisor Mateusz Tokarz, Compositor and Art Director Rafal Sadowy, and VFX Producer Krzysztof Krok, which we made available to you free of charge on 29 September 2021 .

More for Witcher fans: Looking for more Witcher reading material? Then click back to 05.01.2022 and find out what the success-spoilt Poles were able to achieve with the major gaming project The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.

Geralt von Riva slaying at Animago? By the way: Our very own Animago also made Witcher history. You can find out what we mean by this by clicking on 3 February 2022, when we told you how the launch cinematic “Wild Hunt” for the video game “The Witcher 3” picked up an Animago Award in 2015. We think so: If you want to know who will win the vampire-vamp battle against Geralt of Riva, you should add this launch cinematic to your watchlist.

Click further: If you want to learn more about Cinesite’s dragon-powered VFXs, click through the lavishly illustrated case study that Cinesite put online on the occasion of their work on the 2nd Witcher season.

Cinesite The Witcher S2 Basilisk Breakdown Reel

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

In nuce: Ziva Dynamics releases Ziva VFX 2.0, the latest version of the Maya plugin that allows you to simulate muscle tissue. Some of the prominent examples in which Ziva has been used to date are the streaming series “Game of Thrones” and “Lost in Space”. But Ziva has also been used in feature films such as “Venom”, “Godzilla vs. Kong” and “John Wick 3”.

What new features can you expect? The new features that version 2.0 brings with it include the following:

• New additions: The so-called Iterative Solver is an alternative to the standard Direct Solver. However, the Iterative Solver is currently still in the development phase
• The quasistatic integrators have been improved in terms of stability and performance. “Quasistatic” is a term used in physics to describe processes that are approximately static when observed
• Now also supports the cached playback function from Maya 2022
• The Cache Tet Mesh attribute has been added to the zTet node
• Runup weight added to the zSolver node
• …and many more features and bug fixes. You can find out exactly what these are in the corresponding release note .

Cost: You can get the 60-day trial version of Ziva for free. The indie version is priced at 50 dollars per month, while the studio version costs 1,800 dollars per year. You can find out everything else at zivadynamics.com (just scroll down a little).

Click further: If you’re looking to get started with Ziva, it might be worth clicking back to 04/08/2020 . Back then, we introduced you to the tutorial by Benjamin Makki, published by The Rookies, which explains how to create a domestic cat with realistic-looking muscles.

Look further: In the following video, you can see and hear exactly what Ziva is. By the way: The dinosaur in the cover picture is a case study that can be viewed on zivadynamics.com, which explains step by step how the software works.

What is Ziva VFX?

The post New version of Ziva released! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In this VFX breakdown for the sci-fi sequel Independence Day: Resurgence, Weta Digital – along with its ID’s Alien Harvester – shows all the H.R. Giger-esque alien queens which dedicated line E.T. uses to phone home.

To quote Dr Brackish Okun: “Time to kick some serious alien ass!”

Independence Day: Resurgence VFX | Weta Digital

The post Independence Day: Resurgence | VFX-Breakdown first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In this short video, the South African VFX studio Black Ginger presents its work on the video game adaptation Monster Hunter. Black Ginger was responsible for two sequences from the film by genre film maestro Paul W. S. Anderson. In both scenes, the Apceros – a mixture of Ankylosaurus and Koopa Troopa – take centre stage.

“Roll the film – and stampede too!” for the cute little guys!

Monster Hunter – VFX Reel

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

Penguin Bloom

In this VFX breakdown, Altvfx demonstrates how to make an Australian pheasant crow look believable, whether in flight, wrestling with fellow birds – or resting on Naomi Watt’s forearm during a time-out.

The Australian-American Netflix film Penguin Bloom, based on the book of the same name by Cameron Bloom and Bradley Trevor Greive, tells the story of a woman who becomes a wheelchair user after an accident; she then struggles with herself and her new circumstances, but soon regains her courage to face life after taking in and caring for an injured flute bird.

We find: The creature character Flute Crow Star deserves the VFX Bird of the Year award!

Penguin Bloom (2021) – VFX Breakdown

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

Spherical flying objects, wood-eating worms and freshly tapped ectoplasm are part of a successful evening of television for you? Then get lost in the revival of Rod Sterling’s classic series The Twilight Zone. Digital Domain shows you what’s worth being grossed out by in The Twilight Zone in the VFX breakdown below.

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

In the Disney film, the hero played by Willem Dafoe and a lead dog become the saviours in the legendary serum Run to Nome. In the VFX breakdown from DNEG Studios, numerous contributors have their say: Animation Supervisor Aaron Gilman, Animation Leads Arna Diego and Leonardo Bonisolli, Creature Supervisor Adam Vanner, Build Lead Lucas Cuenca and Creature Lead Mischa Kolbe talk about the three-minute film.

The facial performances of the four-legged friends posed a particular challenge for the team. Creating a believable movement sequence for the eleven sled dogs while an ice floe collapses under their paws was another challenge for the DNEG artists. Find out more in the video below:

The post Togo – The Untold True Story | VFX-Breakdown first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

The Embassy provided a total of over 700 VFX shots for the Netflix series Warrior Nun, with the studio responsible for both concept design and on-set supervision. Further information about The Embassy and their work on Warrior Nun can be found on their website.

The post Warrior Nun | VFX-Breakdown von The Embassy 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.

This article by Anna Huber originally appeared in DP 02 : 2014.

In this still, a lively metal panther catches the viewer’s eye. With its emerald green eyes and filigree decorations, the animal looks like a piece of jewellery. The animago submission for the still category 2O13 was created by 3D artist Anna Huber.

The image was originally created for a 3D contest on PSD-Tutorials on the subject of “Steampunk”. My idea was to transform a real living creature into a machine. The mechanical creature was to have the characteristic features of the animal and the typical steampunk elements. I decided on a panther – an elegant creature, light-footed and fluid in its movements. And filigree in a certain way. A steampunk panther should not be made of heavy metal parts, which would make it appear heavy and clumsy. Instead, thin plates were important, which defined the body in ornate ornaments and also gave the viewer a view into or through the body. The ornaments and decorations were not chosen at random, but reflect the panther’s area of distribution and thus the cultural patterns of the population in Africa. I used Cinema 4D as the software and V-Ray as the renderer. Photoshop was used for post-production.

Light / Rendering / Camera

The first step was to set the global illumination in the V-Ray render settings. I created the basic lighting using an HDRI light. The nice thing about HDRIs is that they create a general and – depending on the setting – realistic basic brightness with a certain colour mood. This gives you an initial overview of the lighting mood. In the next step, I loaded the HDRI motif into the V-Ray Area Light and changed the Area-Type to “Dome”. “Enable Shadows” and “Invisible” were activated. To ensure that the lighting conditions of the background texture and the scene match later on, the area light was aligned so that the “sun” of the HDRI comes from the same direction as the “light” on the background texture later on.Finally, I added another light source directly behind the panther to intensify the overexposed sun of the background image by casting a shadow on the panther. The camera was fitted with a 50 mm lens, the aperture was set to 2.8 and 1/100 second was selected as the exposure time. A beauty pass and the corresponding multipass layers were rendered.

Materials

All materials were created in V-Ray. The metal material was generated first. To do this, a photo of a metal plate, which had previously been colour-adjusted in Photoshop, was loaded into Diffuse Layer 1. To adjust the final details of the colour directly in Cinema 4D, I also loaded a filter shader into diffuse layer 1. In this, the saturation was set to 51 per cent and the gamma value to 1.4. In the Bump Channel, the same photo of the metal plate was loaded only in black and white and Bump Amount was set to 1 cm. Specular Layer 2 was responsible for the highlights. In addition to the general settings, I entered -0.5 for Anisotropy. Specular Layer 3 was used for the specular reflection. I also activated Fresnel and set its IOR to 2.43. The Reflection Glossiness was set to 0.8 and the Glossiness Subdivs were increased to 12 to avoid too much grain. I realised the concrete and stone material with the help of suitable textures and it has a similar structure to the metal materials.

Modelling

First of all, I roughly outlined the panther so that I could later adapt the shapes of the individual plates to the skeleton better. The skeleton should be visible through the plates and decorations and was modelled true to life. I replaced the bones with bent iron rods and the joints with cogwheels, cadre joints and metal joints. The plates were then modelled and adapted piece by piece. For the plates with the spirals, I mainly used Bezier and helix splines, which were subordinated to sweep nurbs together with a rectangle spline. First, the plates with the decorations had to be modelled flat and then brought into the correct shape using deformers. The pure metal plates were modelled poly by poly. The “Edge selection to spline” tool was used to create a spline for the border. This was then subordinated to a sweep nurbs together with a rectangle spline. Finally, I had to connect the panels both to the skeleton and to each other.

Rigging

The rigging was built in parallel with the modelling to ensure that the individual parts interlocked perfectly. Due to the mobility of the outer shell and the skeleton, I had to make sure that the axes of the joints were congruent with the axes of the modelled joints or that they overlapped. This ensured that the movement of the plates was synchronised with the joints and that the axes of the joints always rotated around their centre point. IK chains were used for the legs. There were additional controllers with an Xpresso setup for the claws. The face was also realised using an Xpresso setup. For this, I created user data in a null object and connected it in an Xpresso tag with the angle of the jaw, the ears and the visor using a range converter. Finally, all modelled parts were subordinated to the corresponding joints. In order to keep the whole thing a little clearer and to be able to quickly show and hide individual areas of the panther, layers were assigned to all objects.

Problems

The main problem with the panther was that everything had to fit together well, but the panels could not collide with each other during posing and animation. The solution was to build the rig in parallel with the modelling and to test it again and again right from the start. The scene was very polygon-heavy and slowed down my work in the editor. For this reason, I worked a lot with the layer manager and set the detail level of the editor to “low”, especially when texturing and posing. This made it possible to easily show and hide or render individual parts of the panther.

References

Visual and textual references about appearance, movement and behaviour are essential for a realistic representation of the object. In addition to various panther reference images for a correct skeleton and muscle structure, I was inspired by steampunk elements, armour, metal decorations and ornaments.

Post-production

I used Photoshop for the post-production. To achieve a stronger metallic effect, I enhanced the highlight and the reflection using the corresponding multipass layers. The background texture was colour-matched to the panther, creating a warm, unnatural mood.

The post Steampunk Panther first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

Weta Digital, the Australian studio that has provided the special effects for blockbusters such as “District 9”, “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, creates a freaky planet, alien life forms and humanoid stars for James Cameron’s eagerly awaited film “Avatar”.

Can he still do it? in 1997, director/screenwriter/producer/writer James Cameron’s “Titanic” won eleven Oscars and grossed over 1.8 billion US dollars worldwide. So it’s no wonder that the whole of Hollywood is holding its breath at the thought of his latest film “Avatar”. Pre-production on Twentieth Century Fox’s sci-fi thriller began in January 2006, filming started in February 2007 and post-production in February 2008. Cameron shot the film in stereo 3D and used the PACE Fusion 3D camera, which he had helped to develop himself. But despite all the real film in 3D, the audience is mainly immersed in an extraterrestrial digital 3D world.

War veteran sets off for Pandora

Actor Sam Worthington plays Jake Scully, a paraplegic war veteran who embarks on a journey to the planet Pandora through an avatar that looks like a Na’vi. The Na’vi are elongated, cat-like, blue humanoid inhabitants of the planet. Zoe Saldana embodies Neytiri, a beautiful Pandorian Na’vi.

Pandora is a lush, overgrown planet with waterfalls, rainforest and luminescent plants. The luminescent plants look as if they could only thrive in this form on Earth under water. To realise these and other visions, James Cameron opted for the effects studio that won three Oscars for visual effects with “Lord of the Rings” and a nomination for the Academy Award for “I, Robot”. The Australians received a fourth Oscar for Peter Jackson’s “King Kong”.

Weta created Pandora, which is completely digital and where most of the film takes place. The creatures on Pandora, the Na’vi, were created using motion capture to animate bodies and faces. Giant Studios and Cameron’s own company Lightstorm Entertainment set up the body MoCap for the actors to play the Na’vi. In addition, there were a number of post-production studios that contributed pre-vis and effects: BUF, Framestore CFC, Halon, Hybride, Hydraulx, Industrial Light & Magic, Lola, Pixel Liberation Front, Stan Winston Studio and The Third Floor.

Senior supervisor, Weta partner and three-time Oscar winner Joe Letteri led the work on Weta’s digital effects, which began two years before the film’s release. Three visual effects supervisors worked with Letteri at Weta: Stephen Rosenbaum, Eric Saindon and Guy Williams. Andy Jones was the animation director.

Letteri was responsible for the facial MoCap, the jungle, the characters’ blue skin and a new muscle system. Making a film for stereo 3D also had a huge impact on the project. “The result we achieved with the facial animation was the big breakthrough,” says Letteri and adds: “And stereo 3D brings another discipline into the race. There’s no room to hide.”

On set with James Cameron

Stephen Rosenbaum, who won an Oscar for the visual effects on “Forrest Gump” while working at Industrial Light & Magic, spent two years with James Cameron in Los Angeles. He refined the characters and acted as a liaison between Weta and Cameron’s art department. He brought designs to Weta and in turn brought digital creatures and virtual environments back to Los Angeles.

As Cameron directed the actors on set, whose movements were motion captured, he was able to see the Na’vi in their environments in real time. Giant recorded the movements and passed the data on to the digital characters in real time. At the same time, Weta linked the facial animation to the bodies, allowing Cameron to see the Na’vi’s facial expressions and lip-sync to match the actors’ performances.

To capture the facial movements, Weta began by creating a set of emotional FACS expressions from each of the actors. FACS stands for Facial Action Coding System and describes an international standard classification for mimic muscle movements in the facial and head area. If a character was assigned a speaking role, sounds were also captured.

Using the FACS data obtained, the capture team created a pattern of points for each individual actor. They applied the patterns to masks, drilled small holes in the mask and used them to transfer the dots to the actor’s face before they began their performance.

A lipstick camera, attached to a hard-shell helmet and positioned under the actor’s nose, recorded the movements. “It was high enough to see the eyes and capture the movements of the mouth at the same time,” says Rosenbaum. To record the movements of the eyes, the studio developed software that captured the movements of the pupils. It was then possible to superimpose the facial movements onto a textured model in real time. This allowed Cameron and the actors to view the movements of the digital Na’vi as if there was a video of the recorded scenes.

Cameron also had a virtual camera system, a nine-inch diagonal LED screen with a steering wheel around it and tracking markers on it. As soon as the actors started moving on the motion capture stage, Cameron was able to use the virtual camera to coordinate the shots while seeing the Na’vi in their environment with body movements and facial expressions. Even though there was sometimes a delay of three or four frames, it was possible for Cameron to shoot his film during the motion capture.

Later, of course, everything was optimised again. Cameron edited the movements of the cameras and Weta tweaked the movements once again. “It wasn’t as massive as previous motion capture productions,” says Rosenbaum. “For the most part, the animators had to deal with the movement of the creatures and the interaction between creatures and characters. So if that interaction wasn’t perfect or if Jim wanted to re-choreograph a shot, that was reworked. But for the most part, the captures were taken from bodies or faces.”

The animations

“Basically, the motion capture worked well,” agrees Animation Director Andy Jones, noting that Giant’s body capture was very clean. The character designers and modellers had the task of shaping the Na’vi with narrower hips and shoulders and long necks. It wasn’t just a matter of lengthening the bodies to three metres tall. This helped to transfer the motion capture from the actors to the digital figures. Giant also didn’t capture any movements of the hands and fingers. The animators at Weta added this information as well as that of the tails and ears. The blue creatures use their tails like a cat.

The facial animation was a bigger challenge for Weta. “Jim [Cameron’s] expectations were so high,” says Jones. The motion data from the facial camera resulted in a facial system. But the key to success was to do it twice.

Jeff Unay created a system based on blend shapes that mimicked a volumetric muscle system. For Neytiri’s face, which was an interpretation of actress Zoe Saldana’s face, Unay created a total of 1,500 blend shapes. The animators, on the other hand, only saw 50 and controlled the rest using a slider.

The animators teamed up with the facial animation team to post-process the data to make Saldana’s facial expressions even more accurate. “The motion editors were so good at it that they almost became animators,” says Jones. Even though some of the face tracking was good enough for the lip synchronisation and mouth movement, the animators still worked extensively on the eye and eyebrow animation.

In addition to the humanoid characters, Weta also created and animated ten six-legged creatures, four flying animals and a variety of bugs.

“Almost all the creatures have six legs,” says Jones. “It’s both difficult and fun to animate them all at the same time.” To begin with, they hid the centre legs and treated the animals as if they were quadrupeds. Only then did they add the middle legs. Sometimes the creatures lift the front legs and use them as a kind of arm.

To animate the Na’vi while riding a flying creature, the animators started with motion captures of the actors on a gimballed “horse”. Because it often came down to the creature influencing the Na’vi’s movements, the animation was changed and reduced to just the riding style and eye line.

A new dynamic muscle system gave the strange-looking creatures realistic and believable behaviour. “For Gollum, we had a muscle system that was based on fat layers,” says Saindon. “Now we calculate the connections to the muscles, how they interact and move. We get much more accurate simulations that require less effort. The animators realised the creatures’ muscle system using keyframes. For the characters, it was done using motion data. The results were then further optimised by the animators as required.

Pandora: All 3D

The majority of the film takes place in the jungle, which is always digital and always 3D: the plants, the riverbeds, the waterfalls, the characters, the creatures, the effects. “The views from above may often look like matte paintings,” says Williams. “But they’re all done in 3D space.”

The work was done in Maya. The basis was FBX data created by Lightstorm to see where Cameron wanted the plants placed. Cameron had specified nearly 400 different types of plants on cards that he could move back and forth in MotionBuilder. Then, because the jungle had to be modelled entirely in 3D, Weta designed the appropriate plants, some with under a million polygons.

The effects team considered growing the plants during the rendering process. However, they realised that the jungle was very large and complex. It would have taken too much time and they needed the geometric structure for the plants, characters and creatures to interact. So they created a rule-based system. Once they had created a plant, they could immediately create variants – younger or older plants, ones with more branches, different heights and so on. They did this by changing the seed data at the beginning, so to speak, to get random results.

In addition, the people responsible for the gardens also grew plants with Massive. “We gave Massive a terrain with large plants and Massive created a forest from it. A forest with realistic growth rules where, for example, plants fought for light and space to grow,” explains Williams. Rigs within almost all the plants made it possible for branches and leaves to move when characters jumped on them or brushed against them as they walked past.

All plants are bioluminescent. When the actors walk through the jungle in the dark, the plants light up. Some glow from the inside out. Others have a kind of glowing moss that grows on the plant. During the day, the plants are lighter in colour on the upper side of the leaves than on the underside. In the beginning, the plants were just as blue in colour as the Na’vi. However, the blue sky in combination with blue plants and blue figures was too monotonous.

Instead, the jungle was given an exotic colour scheme with plants in brilliant shades of red, orange, yellow and green, which reflected off the skin of the figures, making them appear even more complex and real.

For the plants and characters, the rendering team used absorption-based subsurface scattering, which accurately calculated the frequencies of the coloured light. “Even though the Na’vi have a slight hint of cyan and nuances of red are visible on their ears and pores, this prevented the colour from slipping into purple. We also put a lot of work into the displacement maps,” says Williams. “The aliens didn’t look right without the correct structure of the pores. Obvious details like pits and minor blemishes brought life to the close-ups.”

To light the complex scenes, the team utilised Spherics Harmonics, a technique often used in video games. “It’s a really clever rendering scheme to render something with limited memory when the object is very detailed,” adds William.

Each plant in the jungle absorbs light independently and stores all the information about the lighting in the geometry. This allowed the lighting team to simply add light to the scene and still get the correct data from each plant. For example, James Cameron created a jungle set and lit it. Weta then took HDRI images of the set to get the lighting that Cameron had envisioned. This lighting was then incorporated into the set. To complement the existing lighting, in some cases it was only necessary to add a key light and a couple of rim lights. “Then we could put the characters in the scene and everything was fine,” says Letteri.

Stereo 3D

The effects artists were able to view the rendered scenes at each of the 20 or so “view stations” with red/green glasses in the respective anaglyph version in Maya. “It was easier to just rotate the camera,” says Williams. “It gave us a good intuitive feel of the area in Maya.”

One of the challenges of working in stereo 3D was that the effects had to be in 3D. In non-stereo films, effects artists put their effects, such as fire, smoke, clouds and so on, on 2D cards that they place in 3D space in front of the camera. In stereo, this results in an effect that looks flat and non-dimensional.

The effect artists therefore created a library of 3D elements for water, clouds and other effects. All already rendered in stereo 3D. Apart from the fact that everything had to be created in 3D – cheating was not allowed – working in 3D was much less of a factor than previously expected. Weta created the film in 2D and knew that everything would be okay in 3D because they could rotate the scenes in Maya.

They only rendered the second eye once Cameron had approved the 2D version. Cameron contributed the data like Convergence Plane for the 3D effect. “Jim [Cameron] has done projects in 3D in the past,” says Saindon. “He’s not a guy who gets involved in pure 3D effects.”

It’s also not Cameron’s first film that’s been heavy on special effects. The films for which he is responsible read like an honourable list of great, Oscar-worthy visual effects: “True Lies” (nominated for an Oscar), “Terminator 2: Day of Reckoning” (Oscar), “The Abyss” (Oscar), “Aliens” (Oscar). The same applies to films that come from Weta. The studio also supplies award-winning special effects, such as for the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and “King Kong”. Many people will describe the work on the Na’vi and the creatures as a new breakthrough. Especially when it comes to facial animation. Others will emphasise the photorealistic three-dimensional landscapes. In a quality that has never been seen before, that could hardly be imagined and that is only possible with computer graphics and digital artwork.

The post From another star | Retro article first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.