Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1058642
F E A T U R E 8 cgw | e d i t i o n 4 , 2 0 1 8 Realm. Separating each realm is a CG river complete with waterfalls. All the realms but the fourth are 100 percent CG. The fourth realm was a set extended with CG. Because the environments for three of the realms were digital, the filmmakers uti- lized Ncam Technologies' system for virtual production on set. Actors had props, but all the backgrounds, including the ground they walked on, would be CG. "There were moments where Lasse [Hallström, director] had actors point to the palace, but all they could see was bluescreen," Wood explains. "So we would do an overlay of the palace and place a marker on the bluescreen where the palace would be. The camera operator only saw the bluescreen, but the director could see a monitor with the background filled in. We'd feed that onto an iPad as well, so the actors could see what the background would look like in the movie." For the fourth realm, the filmmakers created a forest on the stage with trees imported from Italy. Outside the forest was bluescreen that MPC artists replaced with a CG forest stretching into infinity. As for the other three realms, "We laid out and planned where everything would be," Wood says. "With Ncam, we could move the world farther away, or to one side or another. Then we could pass that along to MPC, showing them the new position of the palace from the camera view." WORLDBUILDERS At MPC, artists started with the basic ge- ometry and a 3D map created in pre-pro- duction, and began designing a workflow for building the final environments. "We took the 3D geometry, rendered it from key angles, and sent it to the art depart- ment," Clegg says. "They painted-in correct perspective and scale so we could flesh out the environments when everyone signed off. We broke everything into quadrants and tiles, even the water. We never wanted to box ourselves in. So, we built the environments in almost a watercolor way. We'd lay down the base and build the world layer by layer. When shots were signed off by everyone, we'd finish areas that needed to hold up to the camera, and sometimes do custom set dressing for close shots. In the end, we could put the camera wherever we wanted." For the palace exterior, the team ref- erenced the ornate onion domes of the Kremlin. Inside the palace, the modelers worked from a limited set to create the "engine room," and within that room, the toy machine that turned toys into people. "Even though there was a plate and a practical set that looked fine, sometimes for continuity reasons the camera changed position, so the set became fully digital," Clegg says. 23 WATERFALLS AND A WATERWHEEL Outside the palace are 23 waterfalls and a giant waterwheel, all CG, that power the engine room and the giant toy machine. Effects artists at MPC used Side Effects' Houdini and Autodesk's Maya Bifrost to create the waterfalls – Houdini to send the water flowing down and Bifrost to create volumetric atmospherics at the base. The waterwheels were trickier. "The waterwheel designs were very much fantasy," Clegg says. "They look like a Victo- rian train station mixed with a giant factory that has a network of pipes and aqueducts. They have pipes shooting water from the top that spins the wheel. There was no way our waterwheels would work in the real world. Any reference we could find had waterwheels driven from the bottom, from a river. So, it was tricky to sell the speed and weight. We ran Houdini simulations, but it took a lot of art direction, too. We spent a lot of time worried about how they'd look, but also how we would render them." Indeed, the biggest challenge for all the environments was in rendering them. MPC uses Pixar's RenderMan RIS. "We had all these trees, buildings, lolli- pops, flowers, chimney steam, smoke from the different towns, water, reflections," Clegg says. "It was definitely a challenge. We could put each kingdom, the palace, and the water on layers. But we also fit quite a lot into memory." Adds Wood: "We made sure we cached as much geometry as possible to render as one big pass, all one render, so it looked like it all held together. Obviously, we had deep passes to tweak, but we learned how to optimize and render as one thing rather than piece it together." MOUSE KING The biggest challenge and, except for Mother Ginger's marionette, the biggest CG character in the film is the Mouse King, which appears in two main scenes: one in the forest and another toward the end of the film. He's made of 60,000 mice. He lurks in the forested Fourth Realm. "His design evolved through the whole movie," Wood says. "We started with one SUGAR PLUM WITH CLARA SNOWFLAKES Land of The winter wonderland north of the palace is an alpine setting with castles and villages arranged amid snow-capped mountains in a cool palette of white, turquoise, and blue. Shiver (Richard E. Grant) is the regent of this realm. "Land of Snowflakes has buildings made from ice blocks, with live-action actors interacting with a CG snow-covered ground and a CG elk pulling a sled," says Max Wood, visual effects supervisor. As an enormous glacier in this realm melts, a lake and enormous CG water- falls form behind the palace.