Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/5474
December 2009 47 Visual Effects n n n n Collaborative Effort A range of companies in North America and Asia completed the other 500-plus visual effects shots, including a first: two companies in Bei- jing. According to Hayes, Xing-Xing did nice roto and wire removal. "I felt that on Movie 1, it was culturally important to have the Chinese working on it," he says. "Crystal CG, the sec- ond Chinese company that worked on the film, was an architectural company with no feature- film experience. ey did some of the spear shots, and they brought in some people from the States to work on this." Anibrain also did wire removal and spear shots on the first movie. "On Movie 2, we gave them some more complicated shots," says Hayes. "It was good to have that progression." Pixel Magic in Los Angeles worked on some of the arrow shots and a crowd-replication scene that involved a whole cavalry of horses mov- ing downhill, as well as some last-minute wide army shots." CafeFX handled much of the Yangtze River boat work. "e art department had built all these full-scale props that were almost entirely historically authentic," says Hayes. "ey floated, but you couldn't steer them. If a light breeze came up, you didn't want them on the water. And all the boat captains were local farmers. We were trying all day to make these boats go in formation and fast. ey were difficult to photograph—the rule of thumb in visual effects is that shooting on the water is seven times slower than on land." Hayes says that experi- ence set a precedent for this project. "We made sure the production knew the difficulties so when we came back in 2008 to shoot the final naval battle, we put the boats on land," he says. In one spectacular sequence, the camera pulls back to show an immense fleet of boats on the Yangtze River, all done by CafeFX. "e shots they did were beau- tiful," says Hayes. Digital water was a challenge for several of the VFX companies in- volved: e Orphanage, supervised by Rich McBride and Dav Rauch; CafeFX, supervised by Kevin Rafferty; and RedFX, supervised by Derek Wentworth. All of them worked on creating digital water. e Orphanage worked on both nighttime and daytime sequences. "CafeFX had some unique challenges in that almost all its shots were actually filmed in the water—tied to a dock with movie crew all over place, necessitating some tricky comp and roto," explains Hayes. "Frantic and Red- FX had a different but equally difficult job of working with ships that were shot on dry land, with limited greenscreen coverage. Hatch, meanwhile, did a lot of the matte paintings, including an opening scene that depicts the exterior of the Han palace. "We had maybe two dozen matte paintings, and we wanted the ones we did have to be very artistic," Hayes says. "e scale of everything in China was so big. Hatch held down the fort for the vision of these exteriors in these key wide-establishing shots." Production for the second movie began while the visual effects team was still finishing the first one. Hayes bounced back and forth between e Orphanage, overseeing work on the shots from the first film, and China, so he could be on hand for the shots that would impact the visual effects. In 2008, he spent eight consecutive months in China. He also added a number of new VFX companies to the production, including Red Effects, which handled a number of shots for the film's cli- mactic naval battle. Frantic Films (which has since been renamed Prime Focus Visual Effects) also worked on that same naval battle, handling 13 extremely large-scale shots. "With shots that called for a fleet of 2500 of the same 26-meter (85.3-foot) boats, giving each a unique handcrafted feel was both a creative and technical challenge," says Jason Crosby, VFX supervisor for Frantic Films VFX, who worked with visual effects producer Bridgitte Krupke. In addition to those 2500 ships, the sequence was populated by 70,000 sailors and soldiers, all of which needed to be seen performing on the ships. Lastly, because it was a battle scene, fire, smoke, explosions, and boat damage were required. "We also had aerial shots—big, high, wide shots looking over the navy," notes Frantic's CEO/senior visual effects supervisor Mike Fink. "We built a major pipeline for all the soldiers on deck and a massive render pipeline. We created a procedural way to make the boats float on the water. So that every sailor and sol- dier wasn't at the same angle to the lens in the camera, we couldn't render it like one giant, massive group. We found a way to instance them to every boat out of Massive, and then rendered the boat and the people. So, it ended up being really fast." e team used three dif- ferent rendering systems to create the effect: Chaos Group's V-Ray software rendering sys- tem, Cebas's FinalRender, and Mental Ray. Frantic Films also spent five weeks building a Massive pipeline to animate the 70,000 sol- diers in the 2500 boats. Cebas's inking Par- ticles was used to modify each crew's anima- tion and then propagate the crews throughout the fleet. A team of fifteen 3D artists and 11 compos- itors worked on the sequences, first rotoscop- ing the practical boats. e Frantic Films team in Winnipeg, Manitoba, generated the water and water wake around them. "If they were on fire, we had to build the reflections in the wa- ter," he says. "e big challenge was that these were huge fires that covered 10,000 boats, so you had to see the smoke propagate from the source of the fire and drift across a mile or more of boats. at's a lot of particles." For animating the boats, the artists import- ed the CG models from Maya into Autodesk's 3ds Max, where they did the bulk of the 3D work. e water was a combination of the stu- CafeFX created this film sequence that is set on the Yangtze River. It, like many of the studio's shots in the film, required a great deal of roto and comp work. Digital water also proved to be a challenge.