Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/298092
C G W M a r ch / A p r i l 2 014 ■ 23 six months to create. "It was a tight team," Asregadoo says. "Usually productions are so big you don't see half the team. The thing we pushed most was the photogrammetry. That was a big thing for us. It saved a lot of modeling time. When we were creating the destroyed city and towns, we could use photogrammetry of the destroyed vehicles on set and project them into our scenes seamlessly." Gold Mine, German Destruction At Cinesite, Thomas Dyg led a team of artists that created digi- tal environments for two sequences in The Monuments Men: one in the Merkers salt mine used by the Nazis to store gold bars and looted art, and another in the rubble that was once the German city of Siegen. For this film, rather than creating the environments in The Foundry's Nuke, the artists used Luxology's Modo. "The shot in the mine is a locked camera move with a tiny weave," Dyg says. "Bill Murray flips a switch and lights come on one after another to reveal the full length of the mine with the gold bars and boxes. We used 3D for the rough layout and paint on top of that." On set were the first four or five meters of the cave, a small push wagon, the first rows of gold bars, and the actors. The visual effects team stretched the cave into the distance and put 3D lights inside the rough 3D layout. Then, they painted the walls. "We created a matte painting with the final, fully-lit look and used the 3D lights as a matte to reveal the paint- ing," Dyg says. "The cave is black, and as each light turns on, it wipes on a little of the matte painting. The compositors could work with the client to tweak the timing and the order in which the lights come on. It was 'traditional matte paint- ing meets a 3D approach.'" The crew also used Modo to extend the field of rubble for the Siegen sequence. "It was only about three shots, but [Bickerton] told us the scope of the shots made them among the biggest visual effects shots in the film," Dyg says In that sequence, the camera follows Clooney as he walks onto what might have once been a town square. The camera dollies toward him, and then in two following shots, we see the bombed-out city. The produc- tion crew shot that footage in a rock quarry. In the plate Cinesite received, they could see rubble for nearly 100 meters. The digital matte-painting group added ruins far into the distance – CG walls and rubble, and far beyond, the hills and forests. The artists started with photographs taken of the rubble on set. "We had photos from every angle," Dyg says. "We did photogrammetry from that, which gave us crude but reason- able details, and replicated it across a vast landscape. This was the first time we used Modo heavily and for full shot design." In addition to photogrammetry of the rubble, the Cinesite artists used photogrammetry on photographs of miniatures – buildings with gaping holes that the production crew had fash- ioned. "For this sequence, we wanted only the odd jarring wall sticking up here and there," Dyg says. Then, the artists began placing the rubble and ruins across an undulating plain created in Modo. "We randomized, scaled, and rotated the pieces," Dyg says. "And we did some things pro- cedurally inside Modo. We had Modo place the thousands and thousands of pieces procedurally, which was obviously quicker." This method turned out to have artistic advantages as well. "We really benefitted from happy accidents," Dyg says. "The procedural approach gave us small areas that were really nice and natural, and also clusters of rubble that we might not have thought of in advance. We'd hit the random generator and keep the areas we liked and refine the others. Traditionally, when we do matte painting, we scour the Web or our own library, cut out pieces, and put them together collage-style. This was like a 3D collage, but procedural. It sounds easy when I describe it. It wasn't quite that easy, but it was very forgiving. If there were dodgy pieces of geometry, it all added into the ruins." For textures on the rubble, the crew used the same photo- graphs taken for photogrammetry. "The textures held up nicely in the medium to far distance," Dyg says. "And Modo gave us the physically correct lighting, which helped us sell the shot. We knew the date and time they shot the footage in Berlin. Modo has a physical sky where you can dial in a location, date, and hour, and you get a lighting solution that certainly was, in this situation, very close to the plate photography. Not only the angle of the shadows, but the light intensity in most situations. It gave us a really nice starting point for tweaking the lighting." In all, Dyg is pleased with the new Modo-based procedural approach they took to create environments for The Monu- ments Men. "You could argue we were lucky because we had a ruined city and maybe for a different shot we couldn't use this approach," he says. "But we've since used it for buildings and trees on another show. It seems that when visual complexity is high enough, it's more about shapes and chaos. Your eye ac- cepts it if it's reasonably decent. It was really nice to get a lot of stuff for free. It was more about being an artist and less about being technical." ■ CGW ■ THE CAVE BEYOND four meters is 3D geometry textured with a digital matte painting created at Cinesite. As each light blinks on, it wipes on a bit of the painting.