Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/110653
n n n n CG Characters "The tough thing with the Wargs was that there was always a heavy amount of keyframing rather than motion capture," Reynolds says. "It didn't help that most of our shots had 20 Wargs in them, and that every fourth Warg had an Orc rider. It was like a British foxhunting group, but with all Wargs rather than dogs and horses. The foreground ones would run to attack." The biggest Warg, a white creature that stands six feet tall at its head, carries the biggest Orc. Azog is a seven-foot-tall white Orc, and the main villain in the film. Bipedal Dudes At top, groomers used Weta Digital's custom Barbershop system to style the Wargs' hairy coat. Animators moved the creatures using data captured from dogs. At bottom, modelers and creature developers built all bipedal characters, including this troll, from one generic template. Wargs Barbershop had a particularly large role to play in creating the rough coat for the huge, wolflike creatures called Wargs, a more hyena-like version of which had appeared in The Two Towers, which was the second film in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In Hobbit, the Wargs attack the dwarves in a fast-paced action sequence. "Peter [Jackson] had an idea in his head for the Wargs in Rings, but he was never quite able to achieve it," Saindon says. "Our technology for hair and fur wasn't up to par at the time. We stepped it up a notch and got to the point where they are what Peter was thinking they should be: a combination of a wolf and a lion, with thick hair and a bit of a mane. Creepy, scary creatures with retro-reflective eyes." To help the groomers achieve the look Jackson wanted, the technical crew upgraded Barbershop, the hair and fur system used for Planet of the Apes. "Instead of the old-fashioned way of drawing curves and putting guide curves in the direction you want them to work, modelers have the ability to groom the curves," Saindon explains. "They push the curves around with 18 tools similar to blow-dryers, brushes, combs, and scissors, in the same way a hairdresser would work. Barbershop even has gel." As they had for Gollum and would for the digital doubles, other creatures, and animals, the animators created the performances using motion-captured data. For the Wargs, they captured data from Alsatian dogs brought into the studio for that purpose and from a dog that often visited the stage. "We completely covered the dogs in Lycra suits to do the data capture," Reynolds says. "We captured some nice motion, like how they turn and shift weight, that's hard to do in keyframing, and we used a lot of it. When you have animators who need to perform 20 photoreal dogs in a scene, they instantly want to find some motion capture that would help." Because the Wargs were five times larger than the dogs, the animators slowed down the captured motion data by 15 to 20 percent to add mass and weight, and had the Wargs turn more slowly. They also adjusted the postures in the data captured from dogs, which were uncomfortable wearing the Lycra suits. On location, an actor in prosthetics played the Azog character, but later, Jackson wanted a different look, so the character became digital. "We painted out the first actor and replaced him," Saindon says. "Azog's performance is all based on motion capture that we did later on our motion-capture stage with another actor. The Orc is really creepy-looking, not quite human. He has no hair whatsoever. Big, sharp teeth. Spread-apart eyes set back in his head. Self-inflicted scarring that covers his body. Because he's a white Orc, we played the subsurface scattering a little deeper than normal so he looks like maybe he's underground a lot." Weta Digital built the bodies for bipedal characters, including the Orcs, digital doubles, goblins, and trolls in this film, from one template called "genman." Genman is an ongoing project, a template for a male human, that the modelers and creature group base on data collected from a gymnastics instructor. Using realworld data from motion capture, various types of measurements, and scans, the crew builds and simulates the motion of bones, muscles, and fat, and validates the system they build digitally. "We've done everything to this guy," Clutterbuck says. "We've done full-body MRIs. We had his hands MRI'd in different poses to validate that our hand rigs match real-world poses. We've cyberscanned him, measured him, put him in a suit tailored for him and then taken the pattern apart to make sure our cloth simulation works. Genman is our template for bipedal dudes." To create a digital double, then, or a bipedal synthetic creature, the crew manipulates genman until it fits the required shape. "For digital doubles, we have a model made with photo reference that has a polygonal skeleton modeled from a cyberscan," Clutterbuck explains. "Not Maya joints. An actual anatomical skeleton. Using the outer skin and inner skeleton, we approximate the fit inside, warping everything, the way muscles attach to bones, the tendons, the entire setup. And, we do a bit of January/February 2013 CGW0113-Hobbit2pfin.indd 18 1/31/13 5:03 PM