Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/4522
November 2009 28 n n n n Visual Effects ing wall, so layering all these elements was really complex." Sony Pictures Imageworks: Building the Arks In the film, the plan for saving some of the people centered on building huge ships inside the Himalayan Mountains that roll out of their construction caves onto tall, extremely tall, Y-shaped stantions. As the dignitaries arrive by the busload, we see that two arks are still under construc- tion. e people panic and run to get on the finished ships. Other than footage of the stars and some passengers filmed on set, the environment is all-digital, built at I mageworks, as are most of the people in the buses and out. "It's a huge, huge environment," Nofz says. "e arks are 800 meters, almost a kilometer long, so the people are dots." Because the studio needed to send the arks on to Scanline, the crew modeled one ship in detail, using geometry rather than any proprietary displacement maps, and then replicated it. "We added details be- cause we didn't know if the other studios would need it, but we rendered it only in areas where we could see it," Nofz says. Similarly, inside the construction cave, which they lit with thousands of digital incandescent lights, the artists added pipes and other objects as needed. "e space is too big to even fathom how big it is," Nofz says. "I felt like we built the biggest James Bond cave ever." To create the mountains, matte painters projected textures onto simple geometry. Modelers worked in Maya. e studio's version of Arnold han- dled the rendering. And compositors used Shake. Massive software and keyframe ani- mation moved the digital people racing to get onto the ships. "Your life expectancy on this film as a dig- ital person is not very high," Nofz laughs. Scanline: Floating the Boats, Crashing into the White House Because the script called for tidal waves to flood the Himalayas, Engel contacted Stephan Trojansky at Scanline, a studio known for creating massive simulations, and asked him to help determine what might be possible. "About four weeks into production, Roland [Emmerich] wanted to do a teaser," Trojansky says. "And, he remembered the tests we did, so he created the teaser around the look dev clips. We had six weeks to produce the final quality." From there, they began working on the actual sequences in which a giant tidal wave s weeps away the ships created at Image- works, and Air Force One, which Scanline built, only to have it swept away by the wave and crash into the ark. And then the sequence grew. "About four months before deadline, Roland said, 'I have a great idea,' " Trojansky recalls. " 'What about crashing the ark into Mount Everest and creating an avalanche?' So, we have a lot of water in- teraction and wake simulation, and at the end of the sequence, the ark crashes into Mount Everest and triggers an avalanche, so snow and mud fall down onto the ship and into the water." To create the sequence, Scanline artists first animated the hero objects using key- frame animation in 3ds Max. en, they ran the simulations. e major challenge was art-directing the simulation all the way through the approval process. "e water needed to look realistic, but it didn't behave realistically," Trojansky says. "Having a solver was only 20 percent of the solution. Controlling the solver was 80 percent." As a result, the team decided to use a po- lygonal character rig to drive the simulation, a technique they had developed to create the river god for Narnia. e polygonal under- (Above left) Sony Pictures Imageworks modeled the detailed, 800-meter-long CG arks. (Above middle) A matte painting projected onto 3D geometry formed the environment surrounding the modeled and shaded CG construction zone. (Above right) The all-CG ships in this final shot move toward a loading dock above a Himalayan valley. Uncharted Territory Double Negative SPI Digital Domain Pixomondo Scanline Hydraulx Gradient FX Evil Eye Factory FX UPP The Post Office Crazy Horse Alex Lemke FX Café FX Picture Mill 422 203 154 97 93 90 60 46 42 32 25 23 15 7 5 1 Shot Count