Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1277231
e d i t i o n 2 , 2 0 2 0 c g w 1 1 ash and embers, and additional people." The artists also added a huge 180-degree mountain range across from the lake that edges the village, which is visible in this se- quence as well as earlier ones. "Not only did we have to create this large mountain range, but we also had to get it into the right angle for all the sequences, especially the long shot, where the camera is constantly panning backward and forward," explains Bryan. Of course, there is a great deal of blood in this scene and others. "We never got to the point where [the client] said, 'There's too much blood.' We really had to up the violence ante," Bryan notes. Following the massacre at the village, Nimue finds her mother, the high priestess Lenore, gravely injured inside a cave. She instructs Nimue to take a sword to Mer- lin. Thus begins Nimue's true journey. Since she was young, Nimue has had the ability to call on the Hidden. In the series, she uses this ability to entangle enemies in thick vines, roots, and branches, some of which are practical and interwoven with CG versions animated by DNeg. In one particular sequence, a Paladin is encased by creeping vines. He is cut down by his brethren and taken to an abbey to be cared for, where vines are seen moving in and out, and under, his skin. In the scene, the vines pulled from the Paladin's mouth were practical elements shot separately and combined with the live-action, and the vines that writhe on the Paladin's chest were animated entirely in FX with a procedural noise texture, whereas most of the other [vine] animation in the series was done in Maya, says Houghton. All her life, Nimue has been taunted for the strength of her magical powers and considered an outcast by her peers and the elders, stemming from a demon-bear attack when she was a child. She is saved by the Hidden, but not before she is "marked" by the bear across her back, leading the villag- ers to believe she is cursed by dark spirits. DNeg artists craed the CG bear based on reference from Houghton and Miller, and choreographed the attack. As reference, the artists examined footage of large brown bears, studying their gait, stance, and the way they shi their weight. But this is no ordinary bear. "Frank wanted a specific style for this creature, so we had to obtain the right balance between a demonic bear and a real-world bear, which ended up being a 20/80 split [respectively]," says Bryan. Moreover, the animal was 4 feet taller than a typical bear, at about 12 feet high. "It had to tower over her and overex- tend his jaw, enough to eat her head and torso in one." Freefolk: Nimue's Facial Vines, Creatures, Fey Camp While DNeg created the creeping vines in the forests, Freefolk generated the so-called Fingers of Airimid, a design from leaves and thorns that appears on the skin of Nimue and the Fey elders when they are empow- ered with magic or are angry and in danger, respectively. "Part of the challenge is the way the effect comes on through the skin, almost like a blush," says Meg Guidon, exec- utive producer at Freefolk. "This is important because it is an emotional response in the Fey characters, betraying their special pow- ers. It is magic but has to look organic." According to Harin HIrani, Freefolk head of CG, the group explored multiple avenues, including an effects approach using Houdini, to create a textural pattern that grew over a 3D model of Nimue the studio had made. Once they had settled on an effect they liked, they streamlined the process in order to deliver the effect across many shots and to easily alter the timing. In the end, they ported the texture growth pattern into Nuke, where they could control the growth and timing on a per-shot basis, and then generate maps that could be applied in the studio's 3D soware to render displaced ge- ometry lit for the scene. These CG elements were then integrated into the live-action plates using Nuke. "The biggest challenge with the facial vines was the tracking process. We used different techniques on a per-shot basis de- pending on Nimue's actions. Sometimes we could purely use vector tracking inside Nuke, other times we needed a geometry track in Freefolk craed the leafy design that appears on Nimue's face when she is empowered by magic.