Computer Graphics World

Bickerton says, "As we wrapped up, Todd Hallowell [executive producer, second unit director] said there was every chance we'd be doing a sequel, so because we could have problems, maybe we should photo- graph the key locations in Rome whilst we were all still together." For e Da Vinci Code, the visual effects studio Rainmaker (now CIS-Vancouver) had circumvented the Church's restrictions and created the interior of Saint-Sulpice by projecting photographs of the interior onto low-res geometry, and then placing actors filmed on a partial set into the virtual en- vironment (see "On Holy Ground," July 2006). "Todd liked that methodology," Bickerton says, explaining that the Church had not given permission to film inside Saint-Sulpice. "Using photographs of the actual location worked really well. We had a partial set, but 85 percent of the church was the virtual environment." With this in mind, Hallowell and a pho- tographer traveled to Rome, where most of the sequel takes place, and did the "Angels & Demons tour," as Bickerton puts it. Al- though none of the post houses used those photos for textures or photogrammetry, the images served as reference material. "Ultimately, each studio working on the film essentially approached the project in the same way," Bickerton says. "ey re- photographed the environments and de- rived geometry from online sources and from the photographs themselves." To do so, teams from the visual effects studios joined the throngs of tourists and shot still images with digital cameras. Although the Church wasn't as hostile to the sequel as the crew had feared, the filmmakers still couldn't shoot actors inside the churches, nor could the VFX houses take laser scans of most locations. "We didn't pretend to be tourists, we had tripods, but it certainly wasn't a proper setup for a shoot," says Graham Jack, CG supervisor at Double Negative (dNeg). Bickerton selected four visual effects houses to work on the film, the same stu- dios he had worked with on e Da Vinci Code: Double Negative, CIS-Vancouver, the Moving Picture Company (MPC), and the Senate. "After seeing Cloverfield partic- ularly, we decided dNeg was the best op- tion for our big explosion sequence," Bick- erton says. "Once we had chosen them as our primary company, we based ourselves in London." Double Negative also created the exte- riors of St. Peter's Ba- silica and St. Peter's Square, the crowds that fill the square, a CG helicopter, daytime establishing shots, and exteriors for the funeral shots. CIS-Vancouver built the basilica interior, the fire sequence, and the interior of Santa Maria della Vittoria and Santa Maria del Popolo. MPC worked on shots in Piazza Navona, inside CERN, and the antimatter sequences. And, the Senate handled shots for the Pantheon and inside an underground Vatican vault. In addition to the four post houses, Bickerton worked during production with compositor Duncan Kinnaird. "We'd send him shots from LA, and he'd comp them overnight with (Adobe) After Effects, using backgrounds we shot or temporary stills," Bickerton says. Even though Kinnaird used 2D stills for the composites rather than the 3D back- grounds the effects houses would eventual- ly create, Bickerton found them useful. "It was the first chance to see how the sequence worked and get responses from Ron [How- ard]," he explains. And the rough compos- ites were perfect for Howard. "We were quite a low-tech cutting room, cutting at NTSC resolution in the Avid because that's the way Ron and the editors like it," Bickerton notes. "ey like it low res and rough for cutting because they have somewhere to go, and because they can say it's a work in progress when they show it to the studio. But what these temps do is give them a picture of what Tom Hanks is standing in front of, which affects the dynamic of the shot and lets them cut for picture content." Cataclysmic Effects At Double Negative, Ryan Cook led the visual effects team, which created approxi- mately 200 shots and graded another 70. "ey had the biggest environment and the biggest workload," Bickerton says. To build St. Peter's Square in the Vatican for that sequence, dNeg modelers working in Autodesk's Maya and Pixologic's ZBrush created the 284 columns in Bernini's monu- mental colonnade topped with 140 statues of saints that encircle the huge, elliptical pi- azza, two fountains, the 83-foot-tall obelisk, the statues of St. Peter and St. Paul, and the exterior of St. Peter's Basilica. (CIS-Vancou- ver built the basilica interiors.) In the film, thousands of people swarm into St. Peter's Square to wait for the white smoke that an- nounces the election of a new pope. "We photo-modeled what we could from our photographs using dnPhotofit, our photogrammetric software, and we relied on tourist photographs and aerial surveys," says Jack. "For textures, we have software CIS-Vancouver extended the set for Santa Maria della Vittoria here and in the image on the previous page, and composited fire into the image above using photographed elements and CG fire. June 2009 39 Digital Sets•VFX n n n n Images ©2009 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.

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