Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/259450
14 ■ CGW Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 014 CG CHARACTERS To accomplish that photorealistic look, the crew worked with the R&D department, where CG scientists spent about a year rewriting the studio's water tools from the ground up. "We needed to create water that goes from calm to full-on rapids, that can intercut with live action shot from a helicopter or crane, and that marries in custom shaders," Capogreco says. "We needed more control and the ability to crunch more data sets. With a large ocean, we can break up the surface with SPH [smoothed particle hydrodynamics] noise, but our water had to be simulated down to droplet size." Moreover, on previous films, crews creating shots with digital water typically had relied on multiple render passes to create layers of foam, bubbles, and mist. In this film, the crew rendered most shots in one pass with one additional mist layer. The water is all raytraced within RenderMan. "Our shading team wrote a proprietary shader to create our beautiful water," Capogreco says. "You can see all the bubbles from the bottom of the water to the top, and they're all rendered with a single pass. The particles store what we call 'primvars,' variables that the shader looks up and shades according to age, velocity, and vorticity. Because everything is custom and internal, we had complete control over the look. If someone wanted to color a bubble with a little more red at some point, we could do that." The result is an indistinguishable blend of CG water and digi- tal doubles with live-action water and footage of actors. "When you watch the sequence, the nice thing is that, no pun in- tended, it all flows together," Capogreco says. "There's no beat where you think, 'This is all-CG water.' For me, that's the most satisfying thing after working on the shots for a year. You know water is there, but it just becomes part of the overall image." Lake-town A different kind of water became an important element in the large, canalled city of Esgaroth, otherwise known as Lake-town, the last city before the dwarves reach the Lonely Mountain. A local trader named Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans) smuggles the dwarves across the lake and into town on his barge. Inside Lake-town, tipsy wooden buildings stand on pillars sunk into the lake bed near the shore and on ancient ruins. Citizens chase dwarves through the ramshackle city, as do, eventually, elves and Orcs, too. On stage, the actors walk from partial sets into fully-CG environments. "Almost every shot has some sense of digital set exten- sions," says White. "The lake is CG, and although they filled canals with water for up-close set shots, the water is all-CG beyond. It's cold, so we added ice flows and mist." "Beyond" describes a large area of approximately 50 acres filled with 1,400 highly detailed buildings. "We designed each building to be close to camera," White says. "And, they're all unique. The idea is that the city is decrepit. The buildings lean against the old columns of a city underneath, each twisted, tipped over, and contorted. We have paint chipping off the wood, moss, stains – all those weathering details. We made millions of planks." To fill the city with people, the crew motion-captured actors doing everyday actions – kids playing, fishermen hauling in a catch, women gathering goods, and so forth. The motion-edit department then applied that data to a library of digital men, women, and children, and placed them into the scenes. "We tried to have a library that was as diverse as possible," White says. "We created 10 variations from a generic woman and man that we could dress in different clothing, hats, and hair. We also made digital doubles of all the extras and actors shot for the film." Working with the animation department, the crew in the motion-edit department placed many of the crowd characters ■ LAKE-TOWN'S 50-ACRE digital environment houses 1,400 unique, decrepit wooden structures built into and over CG water, each with enough detail for close-ups.