Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/10832
■ ■ ■ ■ VFX now that is not distinguishable from ILM. We want the same sort of situation with our third- party vendors.” Costumes Are Characters When the actors appear fully suited in the fi lm, the suits are, of course, mostly empty geomet- ric shells manipulated by animators to perform as if someone were inside. T e artists paint, render, and light the suits—in other words, the CG characters—to appear as if a director of photography shot them on location. Bruce Holcomb led the modeling team. Ron In this shot, the actors’ faces, the grass, and the shrubbery on the right are the only non-CG elements. On set, Robert Downey, Jr. (left) and Don Cheadle (right) wore Imocap suits and partial helmets. ILM added the CG suits, replaced the helmets, created the digital drones in the background, and the rest of the environment. was going through the third parties, but we supervised it and handled it all,” Snow says. “We sent the sequence to Pixomondo, where Justin Hammer is showing Ivan Vanko some drones he’s building. We built and painted a drone, and gave it to Pixomondo, and they did the shots. T ey did a terrifi c job. We also worked with Svengali, which did some matte paintings of the Stark house for us, and with T e Embassy, which did a sequence with the damaged suit at the end.” Although ILM still keeps most of its secret sauce secret, the studio feels comfortable shar- ing more technology and knowledge with the studios they deal with directly than they would otherwise. “We still have to recognize that we have proprietary tools that give us some advan- tages,” Snow says. “But, our aim is to estab- lish relationships with the third-party vendors where we know the people, know how to work with them, and build the same kind of trust that we’ve built with ILM Singapore. ILM Singapore has been a huge asset on both Iron Man fi lms. Singapore has all our tools, iden- tical workstations, security cards, everything, but this was the fi rst time we have sent light- ing work to them. T ey do top-quality work Just Like the Movies “This new technology is fun,” says Doug Smythe, digital produc- tion supervisor, of ILM’s new energy-conserving lighting. The new energy-conserving shader set works within Pixar’s Render- Man and communicates with ILM’s proprietary Zeno lighting tools; Smythe created a suite of plug-ins for the new tools. “It’s like moving from really good Impressionist paintings to photographs,” he adds. Smythe, who has received three tech- nical Oscars and an Oscar for best visual effects in the fi lm Death Becomes Her, is a photographer in his spare time. “It’s fun to use the same kinds of techniques in the computer that I would use with a camera in the real world,” says Smythe. “I can actually work in CG and light a CG character the same way as in a portrait studio. We haven’t been able to do that until recently. We don’t have to ask, ‘What colored CG point light will approximate a light source? Do I darken or brighten? What hue?’ We just have a picture of the source light and use it directly. It’s liberating.” Smythe explains: “You can take several pictures at different exposures to get an HDRI of a light source. That picture is the texture for the light. So, the CG light will emit light with the 18 May 2010 brightness and color at every pixel direction you had in that original image of that light source. If you move more than a frac- tion of an inch from the surface, the color from one square inch blends with the next. And farther away, you see amorphous light.” Just like light in the real world. Or, the crew might take a large photo of an entire set and crop out a small, rectangular area of interest to use as a light source. “If we have a bonfi re burning in a section of an image, we might take a rectangle surrounding that area and put the moving footage on an animated sequence of images,” Smythe says. “So, now we have a bonfi re light that casts bonfi re shapes and colored light onto whatever CG character happens to walk by. And we can put several of these throughout. Or, we might treat the entire spherical environment as a light. We can have round lights and rectangular lights. And we can put texture im- ages on the lights if we want.” As light from these sources bounces through the scene us- ing raytracing algorithms, collecting, refl ecting, and absorbing colors, the energy-conserving calculations make sure that the sum of light refl ected from and absorbed by the objects in the Woodall supervised the painters. And, Doug Smythe turned the studio’s new energy-conserv- ing lighting technology into more intuitive tools. Holcomb and Woodall have worked together on so many fi lms at ILM, Holcomb teases that people call them “Bron.” “We’re an amalgam,” he laughs. “T at’s the best thing about this fi lm —our friendship. We help each other with jobs, and the process becomes very fast.” Woodall adds, “I’ve been fortunate to work on a number of shows with Bruce. We’re like- minded in the things we think would be cool, so the days are easy and we have a lot of fun.” For Holcomb’s group, the work entailed streamlining the Iron Man Mark III and add- ing more weapons, building War Machine (which is a modifi cation of the silver suit), creating the drones, building the suit that Ivan Vanko’s character wears, creating suit parts to