Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/196542
Broadcast ■ DEFIANCE ARTISTS sculpted a digital landscape that is familiar yet alien at the same time. the world of Defiance for real. With LightWave, we were able to create this extraordinary world on a tight budget and schedule, says CG Artist Sean Jackson. " World Building The animators preferred to work intuitively as the tasks at hand dictated, rather than follow a strict workflow process. For the creatures, they generated models based on a few sets of geometry that they then custom-altered as part of the rigging process. In some cases, they also opted to use LightWave's instancing tool for cloning a single 3D object to form large groups, such as packs or swarms. "Without instancing, we would've been dealing with hundreds of millions of polygons. It would've been a nightmare, Toves says. " Saberwolves travel in packs and surround their prey before attacking. Modeled and rigged by CG artists Dave Morton and Neal Sopata, respectively, these creatures can be described as a cross between saber-toothed tigers and wolves; however, they have six insect-like legs. The Saberwolves also have tufts of black fur, created using LightWave's integrated Fiber FX hair and fur generation system. In the pilot, seven Saberwolves surround Nolan and Irisa, the two Defiance leads, in a forest and viciously "bark" at them. 44 ■ CGW Sep t em ber / O c t ober 2013 The artists relied on traditional keyframe animation techniques, and hand-animated each Saberwolf individually. These creatures were then rendered using the Viewport Preview Renderer (VPR) system, which streamlines and accelerates the computationally intensive rendering process. Hutzel notes that tools such as the VPR, as well as accelerated rendering and advanced lighting tools, "now make it easy to manage the custom creation, animation, and control of each creature. The render" farm for Defiance consists of 20 quad-/eightcore CPU render nodes. That's a total of 640 CPUs, a level of computational intensity that has recently become cost-efficient and fast. For many of the scenes in season one, the actors performed on a backlot the size of a football field, with 48 buildings crowded onto six streets that were constructed in very close proximity to one another. So the team needed to create a CG aerial of the town to give the illusion of its immense size. And every street had to be enhanced with CG surroundings: scenic mountains, exotic gardens, and other expansive landscapes. Since many scenes involved greenscreen compositing of VFX scenes, the CG artists provide previsualizations of the digital elements to give the director, producers, and actors a better idea of what would later appear in the scene. For the Volge attack sequence, for example, a group of actors were perched on a rocky cliff in the middle of a studio surrounded by a sea of greenscreen. The previs enabled the actors to visualize how this army of armored computer-generated creatures would advance and attack from the CG valley below, so they would know how and where to fire their weapons. "To accomplish clean composites, the production often placed physical objects in the foreground, surrounded by CG environments ranging from alien spaceship interiors to terraformed caverns, Jackson says. "The goal was to match " and blend the live plate with the CG environments so viewers would never know where one ended and the other began. " For any frames that did not feature actors, the content of the scenes would be CGI, giving the artists greater control over all the creative parameters. "One of the overarching challenges in Defiance is the need to juxtapose recognizable aspects of the world we know – like the St. Louis arch – with a completely new and fantastic alien world, such as different flora and foliage, Jackson explains. "We'd occasionally use " photographic elements, alter elements taken from live plates, grab stock CG elements from online sources, and repurpose a myriad of CG assets in our massive library. " The digital asset library, which consists of tens of terabytes