Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/110653
Environments•VFX screen set. Jackson operated the camera on the detailed set. The camera on the greenscreen set was slaved to the first. "We scaled the camera on the second set by 30 percent," Saindon says. "When Peter moved his camera, he could see the images from both cameras composited together. He could see Ian [McKellen] in with the dwarves at the proper scale. We went through a few hoops to get the [stereo] convergence right; we controlled that separately to have Gandalf also in the right 3D depth. But [motion-control supervisor] Alex Funke got it working. We did some great shots with Ian taking a cup from a dwarf who is running around Ian as Ian moves around the set. Obviously, we had to do the roto later. But, we shot it as one pass, rather than doing a greenscreen shoot later." Because the two sets were so large, all the crew wore earpieces to communicate. "Peter had a speaker so he could talk to anyone at any time. If he had to give a quick note, he could do that over the intercom. It was like the voice of God," Saindon says. The crew employed a similar process for shots with the "Great Goblin," and added performance capture to the system to use actor Barry Humphries' movements as the basis for the CG character. "Barry needed to be three times the size of the dwarves," Saindon says. "So, instead of putting Barry on the throne with the dwarves in the same set, it was better to make a smaller set next to it and capture him in his own volume. Then, we used the same sort of simulcam thing that we had for Avatar, but on a bigger scale. We Stereo 3D and the increased detail in sequences shot at 48 fps meant Weta Digital artists had to match sets perfectly to extend them digitally. Modelers added walkways, bridges, and hundreds of individual elements by matching and expanding Lidar scans of the set. captured everything; more capture than we had attempted for Avatar. It allowed Peter to control the live-action cameras at the same time as the motion capture and get the framing." To complete the picture, the visual effects crews surrounded the digital goblin with a CG environment as they would for other creatures and characters throughout the journey. New Tech Digital environments typically started with sketches by Lee and Howe in the art department. "They'd draw the environments behind the sets," White explains. "What Peter wanted was a sense of travel, of going through different zones." Those zones ranged from the goblins' cities beneath the ground to treetops on top of a mountain. Among the largest digital environments, though, were the set extensions for the goblin caverns. "The goblins built cities by scavenging things, so it has a shantytown look," White says. "It is a disgusting environment. There's blood on things." An environment team built the overall shape of the interior, the cavern, and the rocks. Modelers added walkways, bridges, and individual elements by matching and then expanding Lidar scans of the set. "The difficult thing was keeping the same mood," says Revelant. "The same design. John [Howe] and Alan [Lee] were fantastic. They'd give us drawings from different views and say, 'Try this.' But, there was a lot of stuff and it all had to work together. There were no safe areas. We might have one CG shot and the next was live action. You'd be surprised by how much more detail you can see with 48 frames per second. In 24 fps, you had your friend motion blur helping you. Now, everything is very sharp. And, the eye of the viewer always had the live-action set to compare. Textures were especially hit by this." To give the sordid underground environment the required organic look, texture painters worked with scanned and photographed set pieces, artwork, and a distinctive pumice rock near Jackson's house that he particularly liked. "Instead of treating individual assets, the artists textured the environment as a whole using triplanar textures," White says. That is, rather than mapping a texture in one direction on a model, which can cause the texture to stretch as it curves around a shape, they projected textures from three sides—front, side, and above, and used normals to determine which texture contributed most to a particular vertex. "Say we wanted a marbly texture," White says. "We could have a base color that we repeat over a large surface, then another offset layer, and dirt, grime, and moss layers that we repeat and blend. It gives us a lot of freedom. If we had a fixed rock in a cavern, we could adjust the scale in high-resolution textures." A far sparer cavern, more a cave really, with sheer walls and blue-gray stone, provides the January/February 2013 CGW0113-Hobbit1pfin.indd 9 n n n n 9 1/31/13 5:02 PM