Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/259450
8 ■ CGW Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 014 CG CHARACTERS ground like a bat would, but he can stand up on two back legs if he needs to, as well. When the dragon is angry, he glows from within thanks to a sphere inside his belly. "We light it up to the temperature of fire and it glows through the bones, muscles, subsurface, and scales," Saindon says. "As he becomes angry, he gets that fire going in his belly." A new liquid-fuel solver sent the fire shooting out the dragon's mouth. "He sprays fuel using a fluid simulation," Sain- don says. "We plugged that into a fire simulation and ignited it. That gave the fire a sort of napalm look. We could ignite the fire with intricate detail from his mouth all the way out to the point where it hits something." Like all digital characters at Weta, the dragon's internal muscle simulation moved the surface of the creature's skin. In addition, the creature department applied a separate simula- tion to each scale as it slid on the skin surface. Modelers created the overall sculpture within Autodesk's Maya and then used Pixologic's ZBrush for the scales. "We had close to a million individual scales on the dragon," Saindon says. "We tried to build as many as we could. Sometimes in geometry. Sometimes in displacement. When he bends, the scales fold over and slide on top of one another so he doesn't look like a big rubber thing. Then, we sent him to Gino [Acev- edo] for textures." Acevedo is Weta Digital's creative art director and the head of the textures department, a role he has played since the third Lord of the Rings film. On the first two Lord of the Rings, he was a prosthetics supervisor at Weta Workshop. "We had a team of five texture artists led by [Senior Texture Artist] Myriam Catrin working on Smaug for a good year," Acev- edo says. "We looked at a lot of reptile research from alligators to lizards. We had input from John Howe. Since he and Alan [Lee] have been drawing Smaug for so many years, having his input was exciting. We had snake and lizard skins here and got some silicon molds that we used as reference and for actual textures. We wanted the imperfections. We didn't want to do anything procedurally. And, Guilluame Francois [senior shader writer] wanted detailed maps to do tricks in the shader. So, a lot had to be painfully hand-drawn. Myriam and the team were hand-drawing scales for months and months." Each week, the texture artists and shader writers would meet, look at the renderings, and make adjustments. "We put scratches into the scales. We had patterns that ran from the tail to the nose, and on top of those, had scales within scales," Acevedo says. "Because we could isolate every scale, we had an overall map that changed the specular on each. The map almost looks like a piece of stained glass: We didn't have one specular sheen across all the scales. It's broken up; each scale has a different color. Guillaume [Francois] could take that into the shader and apply a different specular response to each." Because the team couldn't predict how closely the camera would follow the dragon, artists working in The Foundry's Mari and Adobe's Photoshop also painted complex, microscopic de- tails into the skin textures that underlie the scales and added believable complexity even to the beast's claws and toes. "He's an ancient dragon, really, really old," Acevedo says. "He has big patches of skin about to peel off like a snake, and lots of scars, ferocious scars on his face, because Peter wanted him to feel like he had been battling hundreds of years ago. So, like in real life, when a patch of dry skin is peeled away, that new skin is more saturated with color." As a result, the artists painted hundreds of texture maps for the dragon alone, with some as large as 8 k resolution. "He's the biggest creature we've ever done, and the heaviest with all the geometry," Acevedo says. "But, the best way to work on a Peter Jackson film is to detail the hell out of everything. That way you're covered no matter what." ■ ARTISTS IN A newly formed environments group at Weta Digital created CG backgrounds for wide shots such as this and extended sets in many others.