Computer Graphics World

June 2009 24 heads were great to work with because of their proportions," Chen says. "Einstein has a huge head that's constantly bobbling, and short arms and legs. e animators didn't have to worry about keeping him stiff like the sculptures. He had a lot of dialog, so the animators could be expressive. It was about getting the best performance." In addition to these characters and crea- tures, R&H created digital doubles that the crew used in whole and in part for Stiller (Larry), Adams (Amelia), and several other actors—especially for Coogan (Octavius), who rides the squirrel. And, the studio ani- mated such famous sculptures as Auguste Rodin's "e inker," Edgar Degas' "La Petite Danseuse de Quatore Ans" dancer, Jeff Koons' "Balloon Dog," and an abstract sculpture by Isamu Noguchi. Leaping Off the Wall e artistry at CafeFX, on the other hand, centered on paintings in the National Gal- lery. "When Ben Stiller gets hit with a snowball thrown by a kid in Agnes Tait's painting, it's the clue that everything comes alive in the museum," says Scott Gordon, visual effects supervisor at CafeFX, referring to Tait's famous "Skating in Central Park" painting of winter revelers from 1934. For background paintings, the anima- tion is subtle—you might see a bit of a wall breaking, or a curtain moving slightly. But some paintings played a more active role. For example, Stiller grabs a pitchfork from Grant Wood's "American Gothic." And, in another shot, a JMW Turner seascape saves the life of Rhythm & Hues' octopus. "e gag is that the octopus is having trouble breathing," Gordon says. "So Ben Stiller grabs the paint- ing and heaves water onto the octopus." Gordon, who had been a CG supervisor at Mass Illusions for the painted-world se- quence in What Dreams May Come, which won a visual effects Oscar, relied on tool kits from RE:Vision Effects, whose found- ers won a technical achievement award for those tools. "Pete Litwinowicz and Pierre Jasmin had created products based on the ideas in the optical-flow particle-manipu- lation software we used for What Dreams May Come," Gordon says. "In its simplest form, you can track the motion in a filmed scene and attach paint strokes to it. And, you can do a lot of things with the paint strokes and the way they appear." For ex- ample, you can base the paint strokes on sprites created in Adobe's Photoshop from scanned brush strokes, or use algorithms to generate the strokes, and rendering to make the strokes look like paint. "We contracted with RE:Vision to add some new features to their products," Gor- don says. "For example, they have a feature that builds random variation into the brush strokes, and we wanted to break down the variation to control how much was hue- based, saturation-based, and luminance- based. at's just one example of many." A number of the paintings started as live- action footage that CafeFX altered—ma- nipulating the photography, as in "Ameri- can Gothic," to stretch and squash the filmed actors into the shape of the farmers in the Grant Wood painting. Some paint- ings were entirely CG, as was the Turner painting, except for foreground characters in the last scene. For modeling, CafeFX used Maya, and for the water, Maya parti- cles with Side Effects Houdini procedures. And, of course, the RE:Vision tools. "We tried to be faithful to each painting in every way we could," Gordon says. For Jackson Pollock's swirling "Convergence," they pushed Maya particles along splines using a system developed by CG lead Scott Palleiko. And, CG supervisor Will Nich- olson caused Roy Lichtenstein's "Crying Girl" to wipe her real tears. "at was a combination of CG animation, various contour renderings, and some composit- ing tricks supervised by eresa Rygiel," Gordon says. "It was quite complicated to make the face look exactly like what we ex- pect Lichtenstein's idealized girl to look like when she turns around." For most paintings, the artists tried to reproduce the painter's brush strokes in oil, charcoal, and other mediums, and then scanned those into Photoshop. Applying such brush strokes to live-action footage made it possible to create the illusion that an actor filmed smashing a bottle is behind the counter in Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks." When the artists took liberties, it was in adding motion—pouring water from a seascape and causing clouds in the sky to move in Turner's dramatic "London from Greenwich Park," for example, and in adding touches like god rays to Albert Bierstadt's "Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains." "Bierstadt's painting was the one most like What Dreams May Come in terms of its setting," Gordon says. "It's only a three-second shot. We put in enough movement to see it, but not so much it took away from the foreground. It wasn't always about what looked right in the painting, but what looks right in the shot." With effects ranging from setting into motion a painting's captured moment in time to causing Abraham Lincoln to rise from his marble chair, these studios have shown, once again, that, in the hands of artists, computer graphics tools can make the impossible look real. n Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net. CafeFX brought several paintings in the National Gallery to life, including this seascape by JMW Turner, using tools from RE:Vision Effects enhanced with additional features and techniques whose origins trace back to the optical-flow particle-manipulation technology used for What Dreams May Come. n n n n CG•Live Action

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