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58 cgw j u ly . a u g u s t 2 0 1 4 V I S U A L E F F E C T S ized, interesting, artistic look for the feeling of the drug inside the veins," Ferreira says. "We worked back and forth with Matthias. What we wanted was a seam- less look. Sometimes that took three elements, sometimes 50 or more. O en we had particles driven by fl uids." At ILM, eff ects technical directors then translat- ed Müller's work into shots. L U C Y I N T H E A I R , D I S I N T E G R A T I N G The drug continues wreaking havoc inside Lucy as she boards a plane and fl ies to America, and the hallucinations grow stronger. She is at about 30 percent brainpower when she looks at her hand. It glows red in spots, as if it were burning. Blue- ish-colored particles stream out from the reddened areas. As the particle streams prop- agate and become larger, they swarm around objects in the environment and react to her movement. Strands of her hair disintegrate into particles. Her fi ngers erode. "Fluid fi elds driven by the ac- tress' motion interacted with the plane interior, which we re-cre- ated from a Lidar scan," Ferreira says. "We used the resultant vector fi eld to defi ne the motion of the eroding particles, and used particle level sets to simu- late the fi nger erosion. We also took advantage of 3D tools in [The Foundry's] Nuke to re-pro- ject the plates on matchmoved geometry, distorting the UVs to simulate her face melting." She looks into a mirror and shoves more of the blue, crystalline drug into her mouth. Blue crystals pour out. She sees her face covered in colored sprinkles. Her face deforms and the sprinkles become clouds of particles that emerge from burned-looking spots. "Luc [Besson] wanted to play with the look, to make it both scary and fun," Ferreira says. "He had seen an advertisement in a magazine on the plane coming here that had cupcake sprinkles covering someone's face." To develop the look, the artists put the open-source so ware Bullet to work in Houdini. "Forces would push the hundreds of thousands of particles against the inner skin, with additional turbulence fi elds making them swirl," Ferreira says. "Some of the close-up shots with the mirror were very complicated because we can see diff erent parts of her face in the refl ection. That meant the face had to be reconstructed from two diff erent sources and had to be precise." V O M I T I N G L I G H T Various shots of Lucy in Pro- fessor Norman's (Freeman) lab show an increasing intensity of eff ects. In one, we see her hands split in two and morph between diff erent types of animal hands. The technical di- rectors created the morph using Houdini and Pixar's RenderMan. "We built the models with matching UVs," Ferreira says. "We imported them into Houdini and used particle level sets and point clouds to blend between shapes and UVs. We also built a tool to eliminate the seams." In another shot, white light streams from her mouth as Lucy moves her head back and forth while the good professor feeds her more drugs through IVs. Artists accomplished the shot in compositing using elements projected in 3D. Lucy later sends shiny, black tendrils – made from thousands of pieces of an unknown mate- rial – from her body into the lab. The tendrils crawl across the fl oor of the lab, into the com- puter room, and up the sides of a computer bank, where they absorb the machines. At the end of the shot, Lucy sits alone in a white room. Black tendrils extend out from her like long, spindly, weird octopus legs. New proprietary "geometry graph" tools helped the team generate procedural instances of primitives meshed in RenderMan to produce a high-resolution sur- face for the tendrils. The surface moved based on spline guides. "We referenced a mixture of things, including chemical reactions," Ferreira says. "It was important that it was not liquid motion, not understandable motion. Luc [Besson] wanted the audience to think about it." S E C R E T S B E Y O N D O U R U N I V E R S E Lucy stands in Times Square. Raises her hands. Pulls them together, stops the action, and then pushes them apart. As she does so, the people and cars in the scene move so fast, they're nothing but a blur. Behind them, the buildings change as time reverses until eventually we see Native Americans on horseback. Reverses again until we see a dinosaur among palm trees. Reverses again and we see Lucy sitting on a chair in a river opposite prehistoric Lucy. Then, we move outside the Earth and further back in time into a black hole. The backgrounds in this end sequence are CG, created in 3ds Max, rendered in V-Ray, and with procedural animation in Hou- dini. Artists used SpeedTree to generate plants. Matte paintings also helped compositors create shots within the end sequence. "For the nebulae, we used [Ce- bas's] ThinkingParticles, FumeFX, Stoke, Krakatoa, and [Thinkbox's] Magma Flow," Ferreira says. "Some of the shots had over two billion particles; we needed 96 gB machines to render them." To build the 4 K shots, the artists started with the end result and worked forward, then reversed it in compositing. In 1997, fi lm critic Roger Ebert wrote of The Fi h Element, "…it of- fers such extraordinary visions that you put your criticisms on hold and are simply grateful to see them." Were he alive today, he might write the same words to describe the 21st century eff ects created for Besson's Lucy. ¢ ILM ARTISTS CREATED COSMIC IMAGES, SUCH AS THIS ONE, USING PARTICLE SYSTEMS. SOME SHOTS HAD AS MANY AS TWO BILLION PARTICLES. Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for CGW. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net. VIDEO: GO TO EXTRAS IN THE JULY/AUGUST 2014 ISSUE BOX C G W. C O M