Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/65909
That means projecting the images onto the LIDAR and painting out anything that doesn't have LIDAR dimension information. If there's a tree or a building or cars, all that has to be painted out and later replaced with new CG versions of those objects. "Then we had to go and break out all of the windows in the buildings because those need to have moving reflections on them and they need to have room interiors," explains White. So ILM artists replaced each window on every building. They have a special "shader" for reflections that also adds a window blind and room behind the window that you can see. Says White, "It's having that kind of variety and those kind of details that actually make the city look believable." White is also especially proud of the new digital Hulk ILM created. "We had so much focus on Hulk. We knew that this movie would really ride on that character. Pulling off a digital character that's believable is so difficult. We really threw everything we had at it in order to make the eyes believable, for the skin to react in the right way; the right level of sweat, all the things you can see in the trailer shots took iteration after iteration to get right." The idea to incorporate the actor Mark Ruffalo into the design of the Hulk was "one of the great decisions they made on this film," White explains. Ruffalo gave performances on set that were recorded with a film camera as well as a witness camera zoomed right on his face so they could reference all the nuances of his expressions. Ruffalo later went to ILM and did a mocap performance, equipped with a head-cam for facial tracking, for each shot. ILM artists incor- porated his physical performance and acting, and shaped a digital double using life casts of his hands, feet and face, and full Light Stage body scans for textures. They even took a dental mold to use as the basis for Hulk's teeth. A lot of time was invested making the Ruffalo digital double perfect. "We took that Mark Ruffalo mesh and sculpted that to be the Hulk. So they share the same topology and textures," notes White. ILM is known for relying heavily on propri- etary, in-house tools, like Zeno. On this movie, White says the focus was "to open the tool- sets to allow the artist to solve problems the best way possible." Sometimes that off-the- shelf software has the best tool to get the shot done a lot faster. Autodesk Maya 2011 was their animation backbone, Side Effects Houdini for visual effects, The Foundry's Nuke for compositing. The environments team used a combination of Zeno for building New York, Autodesk 3DS Max and Chaos Group's V-ray for rendering cars and things. One major workflow change is that they would ingest footage as DPX files, convert to EXR and work in P3 color space instead of Rec. 709. Part of that was making sure all the artists were equipped with HP DreamColor monitors that can display P3 color space. "There were some real headaches at the beginning, but it helped us immensely being able to work in that color range and having confidence on how it was going to look when it was projected," concludes White. WETA Weta Digital had at peak about 500 people working on just under 400 shots for Avengers from early 2011 to March of 2012, according to Weta visual effects supervisor Guy Williams. Spoiler Alert!! Williams says the two most challenging sequences were the "Mountain Top Battle, Hawkeye fires an explosive arrow into the ventilation shaft of the Helicarrier. A large concussive fireball, created using Maya's high- resolution fluid sims, tears up the engine and gets sucked down into the blades and spit out the bottom. Inside the plumes of digital smoke, Iron Man and Captain America work through the wreckage to fix the engine before the Helicarrier crashes. "The detail placed into the sets allowed us freedom to enhance action later by swapping out existing shots with new, fully-digital shots with more extreme action and camera moves," explains Williams. Advances in a cloud simulation plug-in enabled artists to populate numerous shots with complex volumetric cloudscapes infused with improved light scattering and indirect lighting, including a new control for Anisotro- py — important for getting " where Captain America and Iron Man fight Thor for custody of Loki, and the "Engine Three" destruction scene, when Captain America and Iron Man have to survive a crashing Helicarrier. The big challenges in the "Mountain Top Battle," says Williams, were the large number of shots, the scope of the effects and the extensive use of all-CG animation with digital doubles and environments. "Some shots were deemed from the start to be too hard to capture on-location, and at an early date, they were planned as all CG shots. Other shots evolved into all-CG shots to add even more head-slamming action into the scene." In the "Engine Three" destruction scene the proper amount of light bleeding into the cloud with- out having the key side of the cloud blowing out too fast. "We worked a lot with ILM on this show," describes Williams. "They created many of the models that we started with, such as Iron Man and the Helicarrier. When we needed to change the models or the textures of an asset, we would pass it back to them. "This movie is geek food," he adds. "Joss is a brilliant writer and director. Marvel is a great studio that understands their properties to the fullest and best knows how to present them. Tack onto that how fun it was to deal with the production and how cool the specific shots were to work on, and I couldn't ask for a better set-up. Listen, its hard to remember with projects like Avengers that this is a job and not a hobby." www.postmagazine.com Post • May 2012 17 ILM incorporated actor Mark Ruffalo's movements into this newly-designed Hulk. They used mocap, body scans and casts of his limbs and face. For this "Engine Three" destruction scene, Weta called on Maya's high- resolution fluid sims to create the fireball.