Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/928269
www.postmagazine.com 27 POST JANUARY 2018 VFX FOR SPOTS without true collaboration, but the story remains about the journey these guys go on together. We hope that people watching truly believe that they're there, in those worlds." Teams from across MPC's London, Amsterdam and Bangalore studios worked together, creating the diverse locales. Some of the tasks included building two entirely CG ships, which required extensive previs before the shoot itself; creating a spacecraft, which van Heijningen wanted to film up close; re-creating a Himalayan backdrop; and crafting a Roman army 10,000 strong. All told, the commercial contains 71 highly complex shots. "The spot is a feature-film scale project with the level of craft it required," says Dirk Riesenfeld, who led the VFX team in MPC's Amsterdam studio, where the compositing team for the spot was based. "While immersing our audience into the extreme worlds, we had to keep reality at the front of people's minds." The Trailblazers starts out as the four friends decide to frequent a new establishment, and en route are enveloped in a thick haze, emerging clad in ancient Roman garb, as MPC turned 100 extras into 10,000 Roman soldiers bearing torches and on the march. As they charge amid falling ash, the scene quickly cuts to a wind-swept rain pounding the deck of an old sailing vessel as enormous ocean waves crash over and flood the wooden deck. The ocean tosses the ship violently, forcing the men to cling to the rope rigging for dear life. Then, sudden- ly, a pirate ship emerges from the water. For a few shots during which the actors interact with the boat, a full-size practical ship with rigging was used. "The practical boat was really impressive," says Christian Bohm, VFX artist. "Of course, the better the plate, the more rewarding and creatively successful the CG work is." Conversely, the wide shot with the stormy, churn- ing water is all-CG. The artists also extended missing pieces of the practical model. "The sea was the only sequence we created almost fully in [Side Effects'] Houdini," says Bohm, who got his feet wet, so to speak, with the software on this project. "With Houdini, you will always find different approaches to the same problem, depend- ing on who is using the software. Houdini is less of a set of tools and more of a sandbox to create your own, unique approach." In addition, MPC constructed two full-CG sail ships — a replica of the sailing vessel and the old, weathered pirate ship. In terms of the ocean, the VFX artists creat- ed multiple water effects for the final look of the scene, including a big, stormy base with breaking waves, splashes, foam floating on the top, and the main splash hitting the boat. In fact, it took weeks to achieve the desired results and to manage the resulting simulations. As the spot progresses, the ocean waves turn into snow and ice, as the friends make their trek across the Himalayas. "Everything you see here is a mix of practical ef- fects and 2D elements, except for the wide opening shot," VFX artist Alessandro Granella points out. The scene was at an old mine outside Prague in June. To "winterize" the scene, artists created computer-generated snow in that first shot, using Autodesk's Maya and Houdini: Maya for the mod- eling, look development, and lighting/rendering, and Houdini for the effects, such as the falling and blowing snow. "We tracked the shot and then created a new, wider camera from the first one," Granella explains. "Then, after modeling, texturing and shading the ridge, we re-projected the actors onto moving cards and used those cards to re-render the actors through the new camera to get shadows and holdout for the FX passes." At the same time, Houdini artists created simulations for the snowstorm and the falling ridge, exported them into Maya, and then rendered them. Comp'ing was done in Foundry's Nuke. In the next sequence, the four men are seen wearing futuristic pilot suits, as they direct their small craft into battle akin to a scene out of Star Wars. "We knew we were going to see the model [of the main spaceship] really close to camera, so we knew we needed a huge amount of detail in the geometry and textures," says Granella, noting that fine-detail variations like rust and small imperfec- tions helped add to the model's realism. In the end, the spaceship model comprised 4,600 objects and was more than 20 million polygons in size. To avoid having the model look static, the artists added movement — the model has multiple rotation points on the wings, legs and engine. Once the animation was completed, the group integrated it with the effects, creating inter- actions with debris, vol- umes and dust systems. In addition, the artists added intensity variation to the lights, introduc- ing details such as light alarms, making sure everything was react- ing with the action and working visually. According to Granella, the team modeled rough shapes to use for previs, to define cameras and shots in the scene. Then they began detailing the space station until it looked believable in terms of scale and plausibility, using a modular approach that enabled them to add details and changes quickly. The entire model contains 93,000 parts and is built with 150 lights. Because of its size —137 million polygons — the group divided it into parts, using Autodesk's Arnold for look dev, light- ing and rendering. The space backdrop, meanwhile, is a matte paint- ing, crafted in Adobe's Photoshop and Nuke. The crew built the various-sized asteroids using three different types of simulations and two different sets of geometry within Houdini, and then blended them together and rendered in Maya. "Balancing all the elements [for the scene] was especially tricky, and in this sequence we have a lot of them," says Granella. The commercial ends as the men toast one another with Heineken from a balcony overlooking a CG cityscape. One asks, "So what do we do next?" Then they see a steampunk zeppelin appear (con- taining 2,500 CG moving mechanical parts), and find themselves dressed for another epic adventure. "This is without a doubt some of the best work I've done in my career. I have worked on movies before, but with much bigger teams, so the shots I worked on in this film feel like a much bigger achievement," says Bohm. — By Karen Moltenbrey, chief editor of CGW www.postmagazine.com 27 POST JANUARY 2018 MPC's London, Amsterdam and Bangalore locations collaborated on the Trailblazers Heineken spot.