Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/147928
Visual Effects making our pipeline and assets as efficient as we could to get these things rendered. We had big characters move through bigger cities. In Hong Kong, we created three or four neighborhoods entirely, so we found ways to build the city without modeling each building as a hero. And then, we destroyed the whole city. If they moved a shot with Gypsy from one point in a battle to another, we'd have to re-render because she would have a different map." "I have a crazy statistic," DeQuattro says. "If we took all the jobs for the film and ran them on one processor, it would have taken 7,000 years to finish, and that's with all our efficiencies. At the height of the show, we were using 600tb of data." To keep track of all Gypsy's parts and texture maps in the various levels of detail and damage, the crew used a tagging system. "We didn't carry all the geometry around in the base model," Fogler says. "A wire frayed in five shots didn't sit in the asset for everyone to lug around for the rest of the movie. So, if you were an animator or a TD running a shot, you might want a C1 Gypsy with a B2a arm, and A2 detail." Fogler created the tags, wrote them on a whiteboard, and documented them elsewhere. "People would run into my office, look at the whiteboard, and run back," Fogler says. "We try to be smart, and obviously our systems are smart and complex, but at the end of the day, sometimes what you have is a collection of artists who bruteforce their work through." The other characters made fewer demands on the team, although their designs were as popular with the modelers and texture artists. Each Jaeger's design reflected the home country of its pilots. "All the characters in the film, the Jaegers and the Kaiju, have design surprises," Fogler says. "The Russian Jaeger has pistons for hands. The main Kaiju lifts its arms and wings fold out. The Australian Jaeger is newest, so its panels are more futuristic and it doesn't have rivets. Weighty Moves Performing the monstrous machines and the gigantic aliens took three teams of ILM animators – 25 in San Francisco, seven in Van- Shatterdome To combat the invasion of gigantic Godzilla-like aliens, countries around the world banded together to build the enormous Jaeger robot-like machines inside hangers called Shatterdomes. The original Shatterdome, set in Alaska, could house one or two Jaegers. The main Shatterdome in the film, located in Hong Kong, fit eight of the 25-storytall Jaegers. The octagonal structure is approximately 1,000 feet wide and 450 feet tall. It sits 43 levels underground with a door at sea level and a landing 42 ■ CGW Ju l y / Au g u s t 2 0 1 3 pad 42 stories above sea level. A crew of 100 artists at BaseFX in Beijing, led by Industrial Light & Magic's Visual Effects Supervisor Eddie Pasquarello, created 350 shots in the Shatterdomes using a 3ds Max (Autodesk) and V-Ray (Chaos Group) pipeline. "ILM provided all the assets," Pasquarello says. "The Shatterdome, the Jaegers. The artists at Base lit them, dressed the sets, and added the extras." The production crew had filmed actors in a partial set for the artists to extend. "A lot of times, we had only a floor and a greenscreen surrounding the actors," Pasquarello says. "In other sequences, we had a control room in the foreground, and we built everything you can see through the window. Each of the eight Jaegers had its own bay in the octagonal space, and the sets gave us partial cues for the bays, but we didn't have enough to match. We had to create the bays." For reference, Pasquarello looked at space shuttle documentaries. "We