Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/426326
www.postmagazine.com 21 POST NOVEMBER 2014 you get to lighting, we always used to do lighting in Maya with Renderman, but for this project we did lighting with Houdini. One of the main reasons was, this project has so many effects and we always do effects with Houdini, so you'd have to kind of translate it into Maya." How did using Houdini streamline things? "For the Day of the Dead, we wanted to make it look creepy, but with a lot of joy, so there are thousands of candles, thousands of flowers, thousands of graves. Houdini does that pretty well. We decided to do that stuff in Houdini so the lighters could just grab it from there. And it worked really well." You have offices in Dallas and Santa Monica. Did you work across both studios? "Everything was done from the Dallas facility. That's where the main animators are. Santa Monica is a little more for story boarding and to have that connection with Hollywood. But the creation of the movie was more in Dallas." How big was the team for this project? "The overall team? It was close to 350 people at the peak of the movie. We have a commercial division, so that's more of the overall facility, but definitely the team was pretty big for the movie." What hardware did you rely on? "We use Dell computers based on Linux." And for rendering? "It was Mantra out of Houdini. Except for a movie called The Wild, we are the second movie completely rendered in Houdini, working with Mantra." What scene presented the biggest challenge? "The trailer shows just a little — when Manolo wakes up and the camera opens up and you see the Land of the Remembered. That had to be the most challenging. The buildings are floating on air. Flower petals are floating in the air. It's kind of like a metropolis, where there is no ground. That main shot that is in the trailer, that took almost four months to complete! Of course we used that one as development for the rest of the shots that come after. It worked out really well." With so much detail, where do you find efficiencies? "You have to make it look amazing, but you have to stay on-budget and on-time. That's always the tricky combination. We managed to work together with the art department to design all the buildings in a way that we can reuse them from differ- ent angles. As a matter of fact, it allowed us to build these beautiful big worlds, but without the cost of the rendering." Is that the challenge? Rendering? "Yes, especially since every movie is now done in stereo. You used to be able to use a lot of matte painting and do tricks, but now you can't because as soon as you put on the 3D glasses, you know that that world continues, and where it goes miles away. Now you have to build it all. There is no cheating involved." As a VFX supervisor, do you approach animation differently than live action? "It's funny that you mention that be- cause at this convention in Mexico, one of the master classes I am talking about is the difference between a live action VFX supervisor and an animation VFX supervisor. It's huge! In live action, you just go to the shoot and work on your live-action shots. I used to do that, too — and that's it. You don't work from the beginning to the end of the movie. Here, I am pretty much the right hand of the director. I stay from the beginning and I am pretty much the one helping trans- late the movie from a 2D image from the art department into 3D. I am the one who works with the director, and says, 'Let's put the camera here.' It's 100 per- cent much more involvement. I oversee all the departments." Did your experience on Free Birds help? "We've been working on trying to do movies a long time. I have been working at Reel FX for 14 years already. When I started, we were pretty small, so we kind of went through all the growing pains. Free Birds was our first release and it let us know a lot about how to do things for clients and how to do your own work; how the pipeline works, and how to refine it. And we have refined it a lot. One thing we learned was how the pipeline works and how we can make it more efficient; how we can scale; how to work on a big quantity of shots. From 300 to 400, you are now doing close to 2,000 shots. I think with every movie, you always learn something, but in this case, pipeline was the biggest one." Are other feature projects in the works? "Oh yeah. We have a development team that doesn't sleep, trying to work on our next IP. The idea is to keep producing one film after the other. That would be our goal." Side Effects' Houdini was used for lighting. A team of 350 artists contributed to the feature.