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12 ■ CGW Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 014 CG CHARACTERS Man, the rendering engine used throughout the film. "It was all raytraced," Saindon says. "A dragon frame probably took on the order of 12 hours each. The environment, another 12 hours. So, it was close to 24 hours per frame, 48 frames per second. Stereo. Luckily, we have a big render wall." The render wall also came into play during a sequence that featured a river of gold. "We created that with our new fluid solver," Saindon says. "It was a water simulation but with differ- ent properties that represent the viscous quality of gold." Escape from Thranduil Beyond Smaug, Visual Effects Supervisor Matt Aitkin singles out two areas in which the Weta Digital team working on Hob- bit 2 advanced the state of the art: water simulation with the new fluid solver and digital doubles. "The water simulation work is the best we've done," Aitkin says. "It's the culmination of development work we instigated around the time of Tintin. You see it in the water around [Elven- king] Thranduil's realm in the northern part of Mirkwood, but the advances really become obvious in the sluice sequence." That sequence puts the dwarves and Bilbo inside barrels tum- bling down a sluice. As the sequence begins, Thranduil [actor Lee Pace] has im- prisoned the dwarves in barred caves within the Wood Elves' underground environment. "Our consideration was to make this world distinct from the other underground environments," Aitken says. "The elves are an elegant race, so we wanted it to be beautiful." Working with Howe and Lee, they created a digital set that looks carved from a honey-colored sandstone type of rock, and filled the chamber with oil-burning lanterns that gave it a soft, amber glow. The crew adopted a process similar to that used for other envi- ronments in the film to create the digital sets and set extensions. "The layout department artists blocked out the shapes work- ing from concepts created by our art department," Aitkin says, "and, by Alan Lee and John Howe, who joined Weta Digital once principal photography wrapped. They've been with us all through the second year and will be here next year, as well. They are fantastic." Next, the layout department sent the simple geometry to the environments department. "That's a relatively new depart- ment," Aitken says. "It didn't exist before The Hobbit." Before the first film, Weta Digital relied on a typical pipeline in which layout artists send simple geometry to modelers who, when finished, delivered sophisticated models to texture art- ists. Matte painters worked separately. Now, modelers, texture artists, matte painters, and layout artists work together in one area to create hero, render-able environments. "Digital environments are key functions here, along with creature and digital-double work," Aitken says. "Especially on these Hobbit films where there are so many. There is a benefit in having one core group of people who sit together and own that role." Bilbo arranges the dwarves' escape from the underground cells and leads them into a room filled with empty wine bar- rels. The dwarves climb inside, Bilbo releases a ramp, and the dwarf-filled barrels roll down into a fast-moving stream. Orcs arrive, the elves catch up to the dwarves, and a great battle ensues with all the characters fighting each other: the dwarves and Bilbo fighting from within and around the barrels, the Orcs and elves from, mostly, the shore. The Rapids "We shot plates with markers on barrels and added CG dwarves and environ- ments," says Visual Effects Supervisor Jeff Capogreco. "We shot clean plates augmented with CG barrels, Orcs, and elves that we intercut with live action. We had live-action photography without barrels. And, a lot of the shots were com- pletely CG." On an oval stage outside Wellington, New Zealand, the production crew built a circular tank filled with water that made it possible to film close-ups of actors in barrels. "They'd shoot stunt actors wearing costumes with green masks, and we'd replace the heads, " Capogreco says. "But, often, to get the scale right, we went all digital. Once we're past the sluice gate, all the Orcs are digital, and the elves in the back- ground are digital, as well." For the digital water, the crew built a kilometer-long environ- ment sloped downhill to produce the correct water flow. "The layout and environment departments built each sec- tion in its chronological order," Capogreco says. "They strung them together and moved the world back to its origin, and we ran the simulations on that. We tried to simulate the water as close as possible to live-action reference – the speed, the shading, everything that drove the final look." ■ THE WATER, DWARVES, barrels, and environment are sometimes real, sometimes digital in the fast-moving sluice sequence.