Post Magazine

O L D K E LV I N Abrams wanted a heightened sense of realism — more so than anything that's ever been done before, DiComo says, and that was especially true of the USS Kelvin, an older, slower, pre-Enterprise spaceship that meets a ver y dramatic end in battle. "We had the freedom to beat the heck out of it so there's all the dir t and the streaks in the [exterior] panels," DiComo says, including newer panels replaced in repairs. "You can build history into it and that's really a plea- sure for all of us as model-makers and digital painters and technical directors and com- positors to be able to add these levels of complexity and realism." Compositor Greg Salter was sequence supervisor for the scenes where the Kelvin is under attack. Mark Nettleton was com- positing supervisor on the Kelvin sequence and Tom Fejes was CG supervisor. N E W E N T E R P R I S E When first depicted under construction, ILM gives clues to the scale of the new En- terprise like a human-size ladder here and a handrail there, to signal the viewer as to its size. Later, when light plays across the craft's surface, you see numerous plates having many different responses to the light — some pearlescent, some flat, some ver y shiny, some specular, dull or reflective. "We strive for that kind of complexity because it's easy to make something look perfect in computer graphics," DiComo says, "it's hard to make it look real, beat it up a bit and make it not be so perfect." I M P L O S I O N "We wanted to make sure that things have mass and weight," Earl says, and a prime example of that is the movie's imploding- planet sequence. "That was where the com- puter lent itself to being able to build some- thing on one scale and then, if we're seeing it up close, we can dress it in-camera." The imploding planet (a victim of the vil- lain's mischief) was created via ILM's pro- prietar y Fracture program, which auto- mates some functions of destruction while still leaving room to "direct" some others, creating a random, natural feel. Using Frac- ture, the team star ted with a sphere model, made big continental breaks in it; then smaller breaks along the edges of the continental fractures with smaller bits and layers inside of that. "The modeling procedure gives you, out of a ver y simple sphere, a ver y complex model of a broken up, thick planet," says Di- Como. "We send that to the creature TD folks and they apply forces and do a lot of different, insane stuff to have these broken pieces that, when they're together, look like a whole planet, slowly breaking in a dynamic way that can be directed." David Weitzberg was the sequence supervisor on the planet implosion, working with a team of 13. Then there's a hand-off to the lighting and effects sim TDs. They also use the Frac- ture simulation data to add the motion of very small particles representing the planet's boulders, pebbles and dust.You need multi- ple levels of realism to "sell the scale."There are dozens of compositing layers in the fin- ished planet-implosion shot. Similar work is done on missile strikes on spaceships' surfaces, except the Fracture system directs debris outward rather than inward. The surface is told to react to the force of an explosion and the interior guts of the ship get spewed out, including more dir t, grime, large metal panels and little shiny shards of metal, along with the brief fireball explosion. P I P E L I N E ILM's considerable R&D effor t was car- ried out in conjunction with the key players on the Abrams production team. DiComo says together they'd "figure out what we need and what we have that needs to be en- hanced and changed to execute this project." Simple tasks were impor tant, like getting ILM's digital elements through the pipeline with all the proper naming conventions. "That's what makes the machine here go so smoothly — so when VFX elements get to the client they're not confused by what they're seeing." On the "super high-end of the pipeline" is the work of Raul Essig, the CG sequence su- per visor who helped develop the whole space explosion pipeline. Essig worked with compositor Greg Salter who "came up with the complicated compositing script that took all the different render passes and combined them and made it look so beautiful." C R E AT I V E F R E E D O M ILM's animators and layout people com- bined forces on Star Trek. For so much of the film, DiComo says, "there were no plates. They were full-CG shots.You get a descrip- tion 'bad guy's ship fires at good guys' and you have to make it interesting.There's a lot ILM used practical snow, rerendered snow and in-camera snow for the Delta Vega scenes. www.postmagazine.com May 2009 • Post 15 continued on page 48

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