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n n n n Broadcast 'software agnostic' around here quite a bit." The pipeline included Autodesk's Maya for animation; NewTek's LightWave 3D for rendering; Pixologic's ZBrush for modeling, texturing and painting; Planetside Software's Terragen for scene generation; and a combi- nation of The Foundry's Nuke and Adobe's After Effects for compositing. In addition to these off-the-shelf tools, the crew at Pixomon- do generated a great deal of custom scripts. Scripter Jennifer Hachigian overcame cache issues by writing a series of Python scripts that worked with LightWave's text-based project file structure, in essence bridging Maya and LightWave for lighting tasks. The Python- based render-pass system and a number of right-click actions further automated technical work wherever possible, from updating XML files to swapping out geometry. "Our mixed pipeline would not be pos- sible without LightWave's native support of Autodesk file formats and linear color space workflow," Hachigian notes. Devising Dinosaurs Artists built the dinosaurs—some based on science and history, and some imagined and fictitious—in ZBrush under the direction of Dan Katcher. They then used Maya to ani- mate and rig the creatures. In LightWave, the team did the final renders, shader work, and worked out the subsurface scattering to see the "blood and guts" under the creatures' skin. "We used the subsurface scatter materials in- side LightWave's Node Editor to do the complex light penetrations," says Hance. "We also used HDRIs that Kevin Blank shot on set to match the live plates. We knew that if the dinosaur's skin looked like plastic, we'd be in trouble." CG lighting lead Ed Ruiz performed much of Pixomondo's shader work for the creatures. Because TV timelines are so short, it was im- portant for Pixomondo to find tools that saved the artists time. "It was a huge headache to transfer a lighting kit or set HDRIs from one scene to another in some other pieces of soft- ware," Hance says. With LightWave's View- port Preview Renderer (VPR), the team was able to quickly turn around adjustments to the lighting and shading work. Fur for Television In the second half of the Terra Nova premiere, the fictional species of dinosaur called Accer- aptors, or "Slashers," arrive on the scene. Gor- geous yet formidable creatures, Slashers bring the added CG complexity of fur. Creating fur is a huge undertaking and not something fre- quently seen on episodic television. Terra Nova 44 October/November 2011 Pixomondo set up a hybrid pipeline to handle the ambitious effects in the TV series, including a variety of dinosaurs, luscious landscapes, and sci-fi/prehistoric backdrops. episodes routinely have 20 to 30 shots that in- clude fur-covered creatures. "We knew we would need additional buf- fers for the fur," Hance recalls. "It's a high-end pipeline; people don't just take the rendered im- age and make it a little brighter or a little bit darker. You need to be able to give the composi- tors what will buffer, such as specularity, diffuse, raw, depth, and all those things. They need high levels of control to nail it to the plate." Using FiberFX within LightWave, CG fur lead Sean Jackson had the Slashers well covered. "Fibers respect light, just as the parent ge- ometry does, and can even use that geometry's innate texture and weight mapping to control color, dispersal, length…you name it," ex- plains Jackson. "The rendered fur can respect gravity and dynamics with the scene, and can even be styled and combed directly within the scene itself on the fly." Unique Undertaking Zimmerman counts virtually everything about this project as being unique. "One of the challenges of this show was walking in and setting things up," he says. "It's always interest- ing when you're on the frontier and setting up the pipeline for the first time; but, to be doing that hand-in-hand with the biggest TV pilot ever made…it was a fantastic opportunity." Pixomondo achieved the results audiences see on screen by constructing a pipeline that was truly a hybrid of TV and feature-film approach- es. "We knew that a typical TV pipeline likely would not be able to support the kind of quality aspirations that the studio had. Because we were building a new studio pipeline from scratch, we were able to cater a very specific need," says Zim- merman. In addition to handling all VFX for Terra Nova, Pixomondo's Burbank studio pipe- line is working on Hawaii Five-O and the up- coming series Perception, among other projects. They have also created shots for Fringe, Chuck, Outsourced, and Outlaw. "Pretty much everything about this proj- ect has been extremely ambitious," Blank ac- knowledges. "These creatures upped the ante quite a bit for anything on television. A num- ber of people on our team are award-nominat- ed and Academy/Emmy/VES Award-winning artists. They're great people who happen to be fantastic artists. As for Terra Nova, it really is one of those shows that you could only just dream about a year ago." n Courtney E. Howard is a contributing editor for twitchinc.net. . She can be reached at cehoward@ Computer Graphics W orld

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