Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/457057
j a n u a r y . f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 5 c g w 1 7 hundreds of thousands of frames of motion-capture footage." All that added more com- plexity as the motion-edit team would recompile shots into masters or send data to the Army Manager and then on to the motion-capture stage. "Wherever we had close mid-ground to foreground action, there was a great deal of tweaking," Gilman says. "For far to mid-background, where the human eye can't assess the violence of each hit, we used Massive." In addition to the battle, Gilman's team worked on the fi ght between Azog and Thorin on the ice and scenes of fi ghting inside Dale. "It was six long, each-day-full months of overtime for me," Gilman says. "For us at Weta, motion capture never exists in a vacuum. It always goes through our motion-edit team and our animation team. There's always the risk that the data captured on stage will look choreographed or feel too light or tame." B A T T L E G R O U N D To help the audience under- stand what was happening in the battles, carefully designed environments provided land- marks. For example: "The posi- tion of the wormholes relative to the dwarves and elves was carefully thought out," Gilman explains. "Based on landmarks, you can tell where everyone is." One advantage of using virtual production for the battles was that the battlefi elds were all-digital, which meant the studio could control the placement of landmarks based on the action in the battle. The disadvantage was that they didn't know where the battles would be until Jackson fi lmed them on the stage. "Digital environments always seem to be the hardest thing to sell," Saindon says. "You can put a character on a turntable to get them to work. But, the environment is tricky to R&D. It isn't hard to do a digital environment. The challenge is making everything work well for the whole fi lm; getting the detail right." Saindon continues: "That's true for a lot of fi lms, but it was more so for this one because we didn't know where the fi ghting was going to happen, where the battle would take place. We didn't know where Peter would point the camera. We didn't know if we needed to go into detail on a 10-foot sec- tion or do a broad scale of the two-kilometer by two-kilome- ter area. So, we had to develop a 3D environment at real scale for a two-kilometer-square area. The environments group had a huge task." M O V I N G F O R W A R D Virtual production might be diffi cult, but with tools such as those evolving at Weta, it is becoming easier. "When I came to Weta, one of the fi rst things I had to do for the fi rst Lord of the Rings was help get the troll anima- tion for the cave troll onto the motion-capture stage," Saindon says. "It was a horrible night- mare. We had gray-shaded models. It was slow. The camera wasn't accurate." As for lighting and rendering, creating fi nal shots for the fi rst fi lms was diffi cult enough. "We did everything with shadow maps and spotlights," Let- teri says. "We spent a lot of time hand-tuning subsurface scattering parameters to get the right look for Gollum in Two Towers. And, to integrate the CG characters into the ground, we used shadow passes. We had to do so much by hand. But now, we can't integrate everything by hand. Lighting has to be completely integrated to make it work." Spherical harmonics helped the studio move away from point lights to area lights, but when they encountered big interiors, they needed to ray- trace everything. Now, with the move to real-time lighting and rendering in Gazebo and with path tracing, in Manuka, they can work with larger, more complex scenes than what's feasible with ray tracing, and provide more photorealistic, re- al-time scenes to directors who want to use virtual production for fi lming. "I can imagine visual eff ects in the future will become even more integrated into the movie process and thought about earlier on," Saindon says. "It won't be a post process. I think the more that visual eff ects is integrated into the process, the more it will disappear into the process and the more it will become an unseen thing, which is what our goal is if we do our job well." For their part, with Dawn and Hobbit's BAFTA nominations for best visual eff ects and Dawn's Oscar nomination, the eff ects crew at Weta can be proud of having done their jobs very well this year. ยข Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for CGW. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net. VIDEO; ANIMATING FIGHT ON ICE: GO TO EXTRAS IN THE JANUARY.FEBRUARY 2015 ISSUE BOX. C G W. C O M THE TEAM AT WETA CALLED ON RENDERMAN TO GENERATE VOLUMETRIC FIRES.