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C The SIGGRAPH is always the highlight of the conference and exhibition. Computer Animation Festival omputer Animation Festival the captured data for the performances—the super hero suits have a more heroic build than the actors, and the performances needed to be more dramatic, as well. To choreograph the fi ghting, the animators motion-captured themselves fi ghting on ILM’s stage. T ey could see the action applied to characters in a virtual set, fi lm it with a virtual camera, and then show it to Snow for approval. “It was fun for the animators to act the shots out themselves,” Chu says. “T ey weren’t getting data handed to them. It was their own data. T ey were War Machine, Iron Man, and Whiplash.” Everything and . . . When the animators fi nished a performance, the shots often moved to Timothy Brakensiek in the creature-development department for rig- id-body simulation and other eff ects, and then back to Holcomb. “We wanted the damage to look realistic,” Snow says. “We wanted to rip up Woodall and Holcomb are especially proud of the damaged goods they created for this show. “We tried to make it look like the dam- age on automobiles,” Holcomb says. “Some- times we’ve gone in with only a couple days left to make a bend look better.” Woodall adds, “It’s something we’re always chasing. You always want to do better in the next fi lm. T ings don’t happen for real in CG. You have to make them look like they’re real.” Surprisingly, though, the two describe some- thing quite ordinary as their most diffi cult chal- lenge. T ey built suits for superheroes, working weapons, and military drones. T ey even creat- ed the interior of a C-17 for this fi lm. T ey built everything, but the hardest asset was the kitchen sink. During a sequence early in the fi lm, Tony Stark gets drunk at a party in his house and puts on his Iron Man suit. Rhodey puts on the silver Mark II and tries to calm Stark down, but Stark rips the sink out of an island in his kitchen and SIGGRAPH 2009 Computer Animation Festival Guide is made possible by Computer Graphics World, a longtime SIGGRAPH media partner; Produced by COP Communications, Sponsored by ACM SIGGRAPH. This year, CGW has again partnered with SIGGRAPH to present the Computer Animation Festival guide, providing show-goers with daily schedules and detailed information for this important event. Reserve your ad space today: sales@cgw.com Space closes June 4th Distribution daily on the SIGGRAPH 2010 show fl oor 22 May 2010 War Machine powers through the climactic battle using weapons added to what was once a silver Mark II Iron Man suit. To light the suit in this shot and others, ILM developed new tools and Render- Man shaders to take advantage of the studio’s new energy-conserving lighting algorithms. the metal and see it bend and fl are open. We built entire interiors so when we chop the drones apart, we can see inside, and we hand-modeled the peeling open. It was a cottage industry.” Holcomb, Garcia, painter Jean Bolte, and Woodall created the suit damage, with Walker managing the levels of damage in the shaders. To slice the drones, they used two versions of one model: one for above and one for below. Shaders drove the slicing; Smythe revised a technique similar to one he had used to de- capitate C-3P0 in the droid factory in Star Wars: Episode II, and suck pit droids into en- gine parts during a pod race. “We make the part that’s cut off invisible, then add the displacement that distorts the shape right at the edge,” Smythe explains. “T en we put the opposite of that on the other piece and make the other half invisible. T at way we could have the top half fall off while the bottom stands there.” smashes it into Rhodey. T en he tears the kitch- en apart. “We turned the kitchen into a pristine asset and damaged it,” Holcomb says. “It was a diffi cult process.” Woodall adds, “A guy in a suit of armor is one thing, and because he’s moving, we don’t fi xate on it. But, everyone has seen a kitchen counter. It needs love.” For the fi rst fi lm, Favreau concentrated on character development. He didn’t sacrifi ce character development for the sequel, but the action defi nitely exploded. And when the ac- tion explodes on screen, there is an equal and opposite reaction in postproduction. Fortu- nately, ILM and the other visual eff ects studios that created the action for the fi lm were up to the challenge. ■ Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net.