Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/27779
CGI n n n n quence was a six- to eight-week process. Tat process often included advice from All the characters wear clothing, and Rango has 13 costume changes during the film. Riggers set up each piece of clothing so that in any combination, all the pieces interacted properly with one another during dynamic simulations. era pass. For this, the layout artists spent 90 percent of their time on the motion-capture stage. “We had multiple rigs,” Benoit says. “We had a dolly, a jib arm crane, a shoulder- mount rig, a handheld rig, so we could reshoot the camera based on the action.” Te reason for reshooting was that Verbinski wanted to have the camera moves feel like an actual camera operator had shot them. “Matt Neopolitan on our team did most of that work,” Benoit says, “but we also had Gore’s camera operator, Martin Schaer, which was fantastic. Martin came in and shot four or five scenes with us. Just watching him work was a lesson in how to do this. He did the campfire scene with Rango and Beans, and helped with the saloon scenes as well.” When Verbinski was in LA rather than at ILM in San Francisco, the teams com- municated using CineSync from Rising Sun Research. “He’d draw Rango’s head to move him to the left,” Benoit says. “He’d draw a new perspective for the camera. For the most part, though, we got the composition and camera working in rough layout.” Animators working in San Francisco and Singapore created all the performances us- ing keyframe animation, no motion capture. “Tey were all dying to do the acting,” Hickel says. “I was concerned at first about directing the animators in Singapore remotely, so I gave them the crowd characters to start, but they segued to hero characters.” Hickel organized the team of approximately 50, the same number he had for Pirates, into character and sequence leads. “Often character effects are action-driven,” Hickel says. “Tis film was acting-driven. We knew we’d kill our- selves if we worked on one shot at a time. We showed whole sequences to Gore, usually with CineSync.” Similarly, Alexander organized the light- ing artists by sequences. “Tey could work on multiple shots as if they were a single shot,” he says. Because all the assets moved through the same pipeline as the characters, lighters could light sets and environments on the fly. Alexander estimates that each se- learned they needed to produce fully 3D environments for director Gore Verbinski to explore and for lighting artists to illuminate. “The question was how to do full environments without the overhead of modeling and texturing every last piece,” says Andy Proctor, digital matte supervisor. The answer was to work in stages and to develop some procedural tools for creating exteriors. For interiors, they could use the typical 3D pipeline— modeling, view painting for textures, look dev for materials, and set dressing for rendering. To create the exteriors, the artists first established the ge- ography with an undulating ground plane that had a repeated fractal pattern, and, if called for in the sequence, cliffs, rocks, buttes, and so forth patterned with rough textures. “That was good enough to scout locations,” Proctor says. “Gore wanted to equate the process to how he’d work on set, so we kept that flexibility.” Then, they added details on a per-shot basis. award-winning cinematographer Roger Dea- kins. It did not, however, include color scripts, the little thumbnail paintings artists at anima- tion studios create to design color and mood through a film. “We’d have people come in and say that we needed a color script,” Alexander says. “Ten we looked at what we do. We make things look realistic.” So, they decided that since they had never needed a color script before to make things look realistic, they didn’t need one now. Instead, they talked through each sequence. “Each sequence has a certain color con- trast,” Alexander says. “Te saloon is dark, scary, gritty, smoky, like something from Once Upon a Time in the West, and every beam of light is intentional.” Dispensing with a color script, doing location scouting and rough layout on a motion-capture stage, creating 3D maquettes in ZBrush rather than sculpting clay figures were just a few of the ways in which ILM cre- ated an animated film within their visual ef- fects pipeline. Te studio had to wrestle with the scale of the film, the number of assets required, which were typical for an animated film but far larger than any visual effects proj- ect. But, in creating Rango, they didn’t try to mimic an animation studio. And, they didn’t compromise on the quality for which they’ve staked a claim in visual effects. Tey worked, as Alexander points out, from their strength. In doing so, they’ve pushed animated film- making into a new frontier. n Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net. For interiors, modelers created the buildings and props that view painters textured and for which the look-dev TDs defined materials that drove the shaders. Walton would start painting textures as if the assets were new, and then imagine how the desert sun would weather them. “I was working on the saloon, which is a gas can, and tried to imagine how you would put an awning on it,” he says. “Then I realized they would have punc- tured holes in it, and where they punctured the holes, the paint would corrode. So, I placed a rusty hole in a spot. There’s a scene where Rango is walking in front of the saloon and you can see through the hole. It landed in just the right spot.” Walton also blistered paint, cracked wood, bleached sur- faces, and applied a dusty wash to everything. “We had these dilemmas with the story,” he says. “It’s supposed to be dry be- cause it hasn’t rained forever, so why would things be rusty? Crash would say, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ It’s more about the story and the feeling than the rules.” –Barbara Robertson March 2011 19