Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/27779
n n n n CGI how they’ll look in every situation.” Te look developers began working dur- ing the first month of production by sitting in ILM’s theater and watching the thumbnails of the entire movie set to a sound track as Verbinski acted out the dialog. “It was fantas- tic,” Steele says. “We knew from the beginning we were working on a good film.” More importantly in terms of the work at hand, they could see most everything that would happen to the characters. “We could see when Rango would get dirty and wet,” Steele says. “We learned that Beans would get turned upside down. We could schedule when we were going to panic.” Te view painters and look-development TDs then spent the following year creating the characters. “We had around 150 creatures, with 100 detailed enough to stand up to full-frame scrutiny,” Steele says, “so it was literally a year of look development. I’d drop my kid at day care, and suddenly I’d be in a dark room star- ing at an image, trying to describe what I liked and didn’t like, and what was wrong. We’d try to describe pictures using words. With Rango, for example, at one extreme, Gore [Verbinski] would say he looked waxy. At the other ex- The main characters Rango and Beans were difficult for the modelers and look developers to nail down. Rango needed exactly the right amount of detail—not too much or he’d look crusty. Beans needed to look pretty enough to be a leading lady even though she’s a lizard, which took several iterations. treme, that he looked chalky. We’d find those boundaries and then steer between them.” Each day, between 20 and 30 modelers, view painters, look-development TDs, and, often, the visual effects supervisors (John Knoll and Tim Alexander) would sit in the dark room for a half-hour, two hours, some- times three hours, and decide whether Rango was the right shade of green, whether Beans looked pretty enough, whether the rodents Mastering the Elements Raul Essig, CG supervisor of effects, managed a crew of approximately 17 artists who created water and placed heat ripples in the desert, dust in the town of Dirt, haze in the atmosphere, and fire in the campfire. “We covered all the elements, really,” he says. “At first I thought this show wouldn’t be too hard for my group because it was an animated feature. But that idea was shattered fairly early on. There are lots of sequences in which the effects are very impor- tant. A fire-breathing shot, for example.” This was familiar territory for the crew, and they made good use of the various techniques and tools available for visual effects at ILM. For water simulation, the artists used an in-house PLS (particle level set) system, SPH (smoothed- particle hydrodynamics), and a 2.5D simulation, the latter to create ripples on a water surface. For fire, they used Plume, a fast GPU-based system developed for Air Bend- er. For dust, Plume again, and volume rendering. For haze, volume rendering with a particle simulation to describe where the dust is created. “Early on in the film, the town of Dirt looked really good,” Essig says. “But when we started layering in atmospheric passes with haze in the distance and dust swirling by, the look completely changed. All of a sudden, Gore [Verbinski, director] said, ‘Oh. That’s it. That’s what we want.’ ” Even though Essig and his team planned the ways in which they would handle each shot, Essig believes it’s important to be flexible. Shots change. Crews move on and off shows. “You might have an artist available with great skills in a technique different from the original plan,” he says. “You have to be willing to adapt. We have so many tools, and the artists all have so much expe- rience, you have to trust that experience to know the best way to approach a problem. It’s a fluid process.” –Barbara Robertson 14 March 2011 were grungy enough. Tey’d see between five and 20 creatures a day, many of which were repeat performances. “Every once in a while, I’d be talking about something, like subsurface scattering, and spot someone I’ve known for 15 years in the the- ater,” Steele says. “We’ve been here so long, we’re all friends. It was an honor to trust that they’d all bring their part of the puzzle and it would look good.” Because Rango and Beans were the main characters, they were the most difficult for the group to get right. “We had the artwork, but that only goes so far,” Walton says. “When we tried to make him look like the artwork, he had too much crunchy detail. At one point, I was in dailies with the people in Los Angeles and I could hear someone in the background there saying Rango looked like fan art. I said, ‘Hey. I’m here. I can hear you.’ So Damian and I decided to start over from scratch. We took Rango’s simple form and found a good look with that. Once we had that, we added levels of detail that made him look real. But, we had to get his basic look first. It was pain- ful. But, it was great.” For Beans, the challenge was in creating a heroine. “She’s taller than Rango, but her head is smaller,” Campbell says. “When we made her shorter, her proportions became unattract- ive. We had all kinds of issues.” And she was a leading lady, so she had to look pretty. But, what does a pretty lizard look like—especially one living in a hot, dirty envi- ronment? “We tried to get the right amount of bumpiness and shininess, and a color blend that was varied enough, but not splotchy or blotchy,” Walton says. “But it’s subjective. It depends on who’s looking, so you find yourself chasing a bit. Gore used the word ‘honest.’ She had to feel real and right.” To convince Verbinski they had developed