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No Ordinary Family’s Mist Man was created at FuseFX. tached to the camera rig picks up the markers and does realtime tracking in combination with a gyroscope on the camera, which captures rotational data. Lightcraft’s Prevision system takes the camera data and per- forms a realtime track and render of the set and composites the actors on greenscreen into the set.The result is “a very sophisti- cated previz of the V set in realtime,” says Orloff.“The DP can light to it, the director can block to it and the actors can act to it.” V fans had not yet seen what an alien looks like in this nascent form before the hatching.“We’ve gotten glimpses, but this is the first reveal of the fully-realized alien,” Orloff reports.To detailed sketches from the art department, Zoic added extra layers to the physiology of the creature, producing multiple views and color renderings prior to beginning 3D modeling. During modeling, Adobe Photoshop and squash-and-stretch tools were used to tweak and reproportion the alien based on the producers’ notes. The CG egg, which had been introduced in the previous episode, showed the fully formed silhouette of the creature writhing inside.“The egg itself needed the right lighting and texturing,” says Orloff.“The subsurface was leathery and translu- cent, and the creature’s movement deformed the exterior of the egg.” The creature and egg were rendered in different passes with diffuse lighting and specular lighting; cloth dynamics were set up for the egg deformation.When hatching begins, the egg starts to tear and the camera peers down into it. Au- todesk Maya’s dynamic simulation tools made the tear; a different dynamic tech- nique formed the egg’s mucus-y membrane. Reference footage from the reptile and insect kingdoms helped artists with the subsurface scattering that lent a fleshy, organic look to the alien’s skin.When the creature finally emerges, she drips liquid strands, some of which were shot practi- cally and some of which were generated by hair dynamics. As complex as all this sounds,“probably the most important thing was getting a realistic performance from the character,”Orloff says.“The queen of the aliens is watching her new daughter being born, and there’s a reaction on the creature’s face: shock coming into her new surroundings coupled with an indication of how aggressive and deadly she can be.This is when the animator becomes the actor and uses the CG animation rig to create the performance.” Autodesk Maya was Zoic’s primary 3D package with Andersson Technologies’ SynthEyes employed for a lot of the tracking,The Foundry’s Nuke for composit- ing, Mental Ray for set rendering and V-Ray for creature rendering. “The biggest challenge was how to deliver this kind of sequence, which is nor- mally reserved for features, and meet the budget and time requirements of TV,” Orloff points out. But now that the newborn creature exists its future appear- ances will involve fewer complexities. “These things are called ‘assets’ for a reason,” he notes.“Once we’ve generated the set and the creature we can reuse them in subsequent episodes at greatly re- duced costs.” NO ORDINARY FAMILY At Burbank’s FuseFX (www.fusefx.com) a good portion of business comes from episodic television, including the shows Criminal Minds, Criminal Minds: Sus- pect Behavior, the new Chicago Code, Showtime’s The United States of Tara, Glee, 90210, the new Breakout Kings, Lie to Me, the upcoming Falling Skies and, increas- ingly, No Ordinary Family.The principals at FuseFX are David Altenau,Tim Jacob- sen, Jason Fotter and Matt Von Brock. “Over the course of the season, more and more work has migrated to us for No Ordinary Family,” says FuseFX founder and primary VFX supervisor David Alte- nau.The company had done a lot of digital double work for the male lead, Jim Powell (played by Michael Chiklis), who heads the superpower-endowed family and has amazing jumping abilities, among other powers.“The digital doubles al- lowed us to enhance and strengthen our character pipeline.That put us in a good position for the work on the Mist Man, which we approached as character anima- tion, not strictly effects animation,” Altenau explains. For a recent episode, FuseFX delivered some 30 shots of the Mist Man, a charac- ter who can transform from human to mist.“We did full CG character develop- ment in prepro,” notes Altenau.“We knew he would need to transition back and forth from human to mist form, and some aspects of him had to be anthropomor- phic and correspond to the actor’s shape. In his mist phase he had to be amor- phous — somewhat threatening but not a monster, so we experimented with the form the mist had to take. It had to go through vents and mailboxes; it had to be controllable, deformable and go smoothly in and out of his human shape.” The VFX team experimented with the density and weight of the mist and how to integrate tendrils that acted like arms as the mist moved through environ- ments. In one shot, where the Mist Man interacted with the female lead, Stephanie Powell (Julie Benz), his tendrils had to be seemingly strong enough to grasp her by the neck and lift her.“We had to give him enough structure so he could hold her and try to strangle her,” says Altenau.“So, in this case, the mist is much closer to an abstract human shape.” In another shot, the Mist Man invades the bathroom where Stephanie is show- ering. Subtle lighting made the mist visible against the water cascading from the showerhead. And when the Mist Man appears to strangle Stephanie in the lab, husband Jim blasts a hole through him with another intangible vapor: the exhaust from a fire extinguisher.The fire extinguisher was a practical element and had to be blended seamlessly with the CG mist. Having made a significant investment in its infrastructure last year, adding extra software seats, more render nodes and increased storage, FuseFX was well posi- tioned to handle the “intense data management” required by the fluid dynamics that went into the Mist Man. Character animation and set-up was done in Au- todesk 3DS Max, mist generation in Sitni Sati’s FumeFX, compositing in The Foundry’s Nuke and rendering in Chaos Group’s V-Ray.A 20TB Isilon cluster and a 16TB Apple xServe server were used in tandem to split data and imagery storage. “In addition to rendered images and scene files, we generated approximately 15TB of raw simulation data for the 30 shots, so that placed a huge demand on our servers and network to manage and access that data,” Altenau explains.“Add to that rendering and lighting; the tools we were able to put into play with volu- metric lighting on a misty creature were phenomenal compared to what was avail- www.postmagazine.com April 2011 • Post 21