Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/639267
j a n u a r y . f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 6 c g w 1 5 extending plates shot in Iceland and creating fully CG worlds. "Instead of having a base on top of a planet, the First Order went to that mind-blowing lev- el where they dug in and built the base inside the planet," Tubach says. The environments team again relied on Clarisse for shots of the 'Falcon' landing on the snowy planet, rendering the ships with a Katana-to-Render- Man pipeline and the environ- ments in Clarisse. "We had a lot of full-CG shots, but because we had photo- graphic reference and because JJ [Abrams] wanted a practical, nostalgic look and feel, we also did a lot of 2.5D matte paintings with photo projections," Yukuhiro says. "We worked closely with effects. They could take our scene, add effects, and place lights interactively. It was a really good way of working." P U L L I N G I T A L L T O G E T H E R At the end, as always, the com- positing teams create the final images, and for this film, Com- positing Supervisor Jay Cooper led a team of ILM artists who worked on 1,200 shots. Abrams' Kelvin Optical composited the rest. Thirty artists in San Francisco handled 60 percent of ILM's shots, with 15 artists in London and 18 in Singapore taking the other 40 percent. "There was a concerted effort to make this film feel like the originals, which were optical, with hand-drawn elements, rotoscoping, and glass matte paintings," Cooper says, "and, of course, tons of models. We wanted to bridge the past and make it feel like those films, but not antiquated or anachronistic. No one was in any rush to go back to matte lines." To achieve that look, Cooper and his team worked in The Foundry's Nuke with deep compositing. Hundreds of layers. With each shot, they tried to tease out elements they thought were important in the past. "Our goal was to make the film look organic, whether through lens flares, dirt, or grime," Cooper says. "When people think of CG, they think of clean, antiseptic, razor-sharp edges." For rendering, various artists on the teams used Clarisse, Pix- ar's RenderMan, Chaos Group's V-Ray, and Solid Angle's Arnold. "It's whatever knives the chefs bring to the kitchen," Cooper says. "It's what artists feel comfortable with. There are things, obviously, like real-world rendering and environment lighting, that are huge helpers in the way you get the right falloff and the right reaction to materials. But at the end of the day, it's an artistic process. We noodle everything – does this feel too sharp? Does it look too metallic? Too plastic? We have a matte painter on the show, Paul Houston, who has been doing this for 40 years. We reviewed shots with Dennis Muren and [longtime, award-winning VFX Supervisor] Scott Farrar. Getting feedback from people like them is worth way more than any tool." Star Wars' nomination for best visual effects affirms (TOP) ARTISTS AT ILM EXTENDED FOOTAGE SHOT ON SET WITH DIGITAL ENVIRONMENTS. (BOTTOM) EVERYTHING IN THIS SHOT EXCEPT THE ACTORS IS CG.