Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/110653
n n n n CG Characters dwarves also doubled as the trolls, providing performances for the director and actors during the live-action shoot. "Parallel to that, on the motion-capture stage, Peter [Jackson] captured the trolls and recorded their voices," Clayton says. "Peter went through the performances he liked and handed us the selects. I was able to use the motion they captured as the basis for their animation. The trolls are four meters high (approximately 13 feet), though, so we needed to add a lot of weight." The trolls were small, however, compared to the stone giants. In the film, the dwarves encounter the stone giants during a rainstorm while travelling through Misty Mountain. They emerge from what looked like a solid mountain and attack each other by throwing boulders, catching the unsuspecting dwarves in the middle. "In a way, they were simple in terms of animation," Clayton says of the giants. "They had no facial expressions, and they were slow. The challenge was to give something made of stone enough dynamic motion to make the sequence gles' performances, as did the eagles in the Rings trilogy. "Because the birds are so big, we had to make sure the poses were really strong," Reynolds says. "The bigger challenge was the feathers, which are always a science experiment. The way they collide always affects us. We wanted to add a gentle flutter through the wings, and even in the main wing, the feathers bend a bit. So it doesn't take much to end up with intersections. We animated the shapes and the flutter, and then the creature group simulated more flutter and 'un-intersected' everything." To bring the eagles up to date, the creatures group re-engineered the rig as well as the feathers. Although the 13 eagles were basically the same, the crew differentiated them with random feather colors and by changing the look of each eagle's face. Kevin Smith, who had worked on the eagle shots in Two Towers, supervised sequences with the eagles for The Hobbit. "We redid everything from The Lord of the Rings," he says. "Chucked it out. They're new from the ground up. For the feathers, we kind of based what we did on the falcon we created exciting but still make them feel heavy. We had to articulate the movement of their arms and shoulders without causing intersections." At left, the wizard Radagast cures a sick little digital hedgehog, created by the artists at Weta Digital and keyframed by animators. At right, a digital bird flies toward Radagast, looking for the nest hidden in the wizard's hair under his cap. Eagles Intersections were also a problem for the eagles, which, although large for their species, sit at the opposite end of any measurable scale from the stone giants. Heeding Gandalf's call, the eagles fly into a sequence of approximately 120 shots to rescue Bilbo and the dwarves from an attack by the Orcs and Wargs; they snatch the wizard and his intrepid trekkers from trees they climbed to escape. Some eagles carry the rescued dwarves in their talons. Bilbo and Gandalf ride on the eagles' backs as they swoop over the beautiful New Zealand landscape. Digital doubles and live-action actors filmed on a motion base helped the animators create the sequence. Reference footage provided clues to the ea20 for Tintin. Previously, every feather on our birds was polygons with texture and opacity maps. This time, we grew each feather as physically correct as possible. We made the feathers with hair; they had a spine with hairs growing out the side." To groom the feathers, the creatures group used new, custom software called Plumage. "At render time, Plumage gives you any kind of features you want," Smith says. "For far-away birds, we could use polygonal feathers if we saw no benefit in rendering a million hairs." The eagles were one of the few characters that didn't start with motion-capture data; the sequence in which they soar was one of the last to wind its way through the pipeline. "It was a nice way to finish the animation on this movie," Clayton says, "just before we had all these high-adrenaline shots when the dwarves are chased. And then these beautiful wide shots of the eagles. It was lots of fun to animate." Teasers Animators also keyframed the performances of the rabbits, hedgehog, spiders, and the dragon Smaug, characters that played relatively minor roles in this film. The wizard Radagast [Sylvester McCoy] treats a sweet, but sick little hedgehog and cures the digital creature. Spiders climb over his house. And, the rabbits pull Radagast's sled as he races across the country to draw the Wargs away from the dwarves. "We had a slightly feral, giant Belgian rabbit that we used to model the look of our rabbits," Aitken says. "We didn't want them to look beautifully groomed or pampered. We wanted them to have a bit of character. We have great animation of them running, jumping, and pulling the sled, all keyframed. In the second film, the spiders will take over the forest, and the dwarves will have a big encounter with them. We're paving the way for the detail that will be in films two and three." So, too, with the dragon Smaug, whose appearances bookend the first film. "In the animation takes, you could see Smaug clearly, but we used lighting, smoke from his breath, to tease out only parts of him. His tail snaking out through a destroyed façade, a foot here, a bit of belly there. We will probably do an extensive rebuild for film two." And again, no doubt for film three. The journey taken by scientists and artists at Weta Digital to make creatures that look and behave like those in the real world (whether the creatures are figments of someone's imagination or not) is not unexpected. n Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net. January/February 2013 CGW0113-Hobbit2pfin.indd 20 1/31/13 5:03 PM