Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1081428
DEPARTMENT www.postmagazine.com 29 POST JAN/FEB 2019 "But with underwater hair, the guides separate in unusual ways. So, we needed more guides and tools to simulate clumping; we had to get the right flow of hair that responded to the body movement of the characters." ILM added new capabilities to Haircraft, including the ability "to hand-sculpt the hair after the fact, to shape it and get the beautiful poses that James was looking for," White explains. ILM also had to connect the hair to the actors' natural hairlines and pay close attention to continuity. "We were constantly review- ing the simulations in the cut to make sure the hair was all flowing nicely," he says. ILM was responsible for the entire underwater city of Atlantis, which Wan described as "an entirely new, magical place that you'd want to go to," recalls White. "James had references of sea creatures and plant life, beautiful underwater photography, and there was a lot of great pro- duction design. We added to the artwork and implemented the shapes in 3D creating 200 very complex buildings based on organic shapes with a lot of translucency and color. James wanted a beautiful, clean, modern Atlantis built on top of an older Atlantis covered with growths so there was a cool contrast." Ultimately, those 200 buildings became some 7,000 structures, which were layered and lit to be legible to viewers. "Once the city was laid out, we art directed every shot," says White. "There were bright buildings here and dark areas there. The audience had to understand what they were looking at with a quick read." ILM also had to ensure that the fantasy archi- tecture of Atlantis would be "grounded in the real world," per Wan's request. So, the foreground features pockets of kelp, anemones or coral, "something real to latch onto to bring authenticity to the world," says White. "We combined those elements with bubbles, particulates, accurate light and color and depth diffusion to sell the under- water look. There were no copy-and-paste shots. Every shot was composed by hand." The sheer volume and complexity of render- ing Atlantis required both Isotropix's Clarisse and Pixar's RenderMan rendering engines. "We had all the most difficult material types to render — trans- lucent, shiny — over so many shots," says White. "When you cross the bridge to enter Atlantis, there are huge lanes of traffic: 150,000 ships are waiting to get in each, with eight to 10 little glowing lights. And we had to get all that to render." By contrast, the final battle sequence on the ocean floor was "an entirely different environ- ment," White notes. "It wasn't the typical flat ter- rain of a big battle scene. It had undulations and huge mesas. It was a challenge to build a shot, put the camera in and see that a mesa was block- ing the action. We had to reconfigure everything VFX super Mcllwein. There are just under 2,300 VFX shots in the film.