Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/360038
www.postmagazine.com 26 POST AUGUST 2014 VFX IN FEATURE FILMS practical eff ects and atmosphere on- set," says Lund-Ulrich. "We added more to feel the demon distorting reality — a lot of breaking glass as the wind imploded the windows, digital rain and other particulate matter. They also wanted the eyes of the possessed guy to be solid black." Scoundrel's toolset featured Maya and its fl uid sims, Nuke 7.8 for compos- iting and match moving, SynthEyes for match moving and V-Ray for rendering. DIGITAL DOMAIN Previous tornado movies have noth- ing on Into the Storm, in which super storms rip through a Midwestern com- munity leaving death and destruction in their wakes. Although enormous funnel clouds, rope tornadoes and fi re-fueled tornadoes make for stun- ning digital VFX, they are all based on real storm activity. "It was important for director Steven Quale and the production that they base as much action as possible on what can really happen," says Jay Bar- ton, VFX supervisor at Digital Domain (www.digitaldomain.com) in Venice, CA, which created approximately 80 VFX shots in a lengthy multiple-torna- do sequence. "We were given amazing reference footage — tornadoes doing things we never thought of." In Digital Domain's breathtaking se- quence, multiple rope tornadoes touch down along a road while in the distance one super cell spawns a triple helix of three rope tornadoes wrapped around each other. One of the rope tornadoes misses the storm chasers' vehicle but tosses a news van and tears through a car dealership, where a massive amount of fuel is spilled and ignites, becoming fuel for a raging fi re tor- nado. The live-action plates were shot on-location in metro Detroit and Rochester, MI. Digital Domain extended the car dealership building set and fi lled the parking lot with CG vehicles, choosing from its extensive vehicle library some 50 makes and models with color variations and diff erent signage in the wind- shields. "The destruction needed to be very specifi c, with the right amount of damage at the right time, so we honed in on what the director re- sponded to by hand key-fram- ing" the tornado tossing the ve- hicles like toys, Barton explains. "Once we had solid key-frame animation on the vehicles, we used a lot of sims for debris — anything that could rip free, including the bathroom sink." Visualizing large-scale summer screen action can involve a Her- culean eff ort given the number of scenes and visual eff ects to be planned. Accelerating this process and aiding artists in building complex shots quickly in previs is motion capture: a tool known for lending lifelike motion to fi nal imagery. Solutions such as Xsens' MVN camera-less inertial motion capture are making it easy to give previs characters realistic movement via sessions staged in the offi ce, at the production offi ce or even outdoors. "For Hercules, we created close to 30 minutes of previs over eight sequences," says Joshua Wassung, The Third Floor's previs supervisor on the movie. "We used motion capture as the basis of movement for every scene we previsualized. It was helpful in pro- ducing previs animation for crowds, battles, horse riding, chariot riding and even characters standing still in a dramatic shot." With fast turnaround essential in previs, motion capture off ers a way to lay down a high level of believable realism upon which artists can further build and compose their previs shots. In a typical session for The Third Floor, motion capture for human characters is recorded and the data is cleaned up. Any creatures or extreme stunts that are impossible to physically perform are hand-keyed in the previs scenes. According to Wassung, "In a few hours with Xsens MVN suits, we can capture an entire scene that has been written up beat by beat. From there we do a little cleanup in MVN Studio for contact points before exporting all the circle takes as FBX fi les. Our pipe- line team has built a great universal rig as well as tools that can reference a character into your scene, apply the FBX fi le of your choosing and convert the data onto our control rig (either FK or IK) for easy modifi cation — all in one step. Our shot creators can then properly place the character(s) into the scene, adjust eyelin- es and tweak timing as needed for their shot." By using motion-capture data to speed creation of charac- ters' actions, animators are free to focus on the more intricate parts of previs, such as communicating the director's vision for the choreography and composition of the shot. "Motion capture allows you to easily create motion so you can quickly focus on the important emotional performances — otherwise you end up spending hours on the mechanics of weight shifts for a maniacal villain to stroll across the room for 300 frames," says Wassung. The fl exibility of the Xsens MNV suit is a good fi t for previs, which is frequently mobile with production. Scoundrel VFX helped mangle a dead body through extensive CG work for Deliver Us From Evil. Digital Domain's VFX supervisor Jay Barton CONTINUED ON PG 42