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 3 9 Had the artists been re-cre- ating modern-day New York City, they could have used film and photographs taken from the helicopter. However, the city today looks very different than it did four decades ago. Fortu- nately, the team had access to tens of thousands of period photos, yet most were of poor quality and grainy, as this was before digital photography. "A big creative challenge for the team was using a combina- tion of old photos and blue- prints from outside and inside the structures, to reconstruct the buildings, including every AC unit on the roof, the rain gutters, and the hot dog stand on the street. We even [digitally] added the newspaper stands on the ground and inserted newspapers from that time," Baillie says. The artists constructed office interiors for the top 30 floors, including desks, bookshelves, blinds, and so on. "There is all kind of stuff in there to give that extra level of depth," Baillie says. "That's the thing about looking at reference photography: Every photo will have this one little thing that you can unearth, if you pay close enough attention, that will make it one percent more real. And another photo will do the same. So by the end of the day, you will have uncovered 40 to 50 things that can make very subtle and almost imperceptible changes to the imagery you are creating, but it will make the difference between good CG and realism. We spent a lot of time getting that last 10 percent of realism, to make people feel like they were really there." U N D E R C O N S T R U C T I O N The digital artists used Auto- desk's Maya for building the models and The Foundry's Mari to texture them. Lighting was done in The Foundry's Katana, which was also used for all the scene construction and building assembly. Ren- dering occurred within Chaos Group's V-Ray. As Baillie explains, so many people have different ideas of what the towers looked like – some thought they were white, others gray; some thought they had a blue tint. That's because the structures were made from anodized aluminum, so if they were viewed straight on, they appeared to have a matte silvery look, like a MacBook; from the side, they looked more chrome, almost reflective. This resulted from thou- sands and thousands of tiny bumps on the surface across every square inch of the build- ings that scattered light. "The buildings were like chameleons, taking on the look of the environment," Baillie explains. "So on a sunny day, they looked white, but on a dreary day, they almost looked charcoal gray. We had to figure out how to reproduce that." The solution was Sergey Shlyaev's GGX shader for V-Ray, a physically correct shader that utilizes microfacet distribu- tion for better matching the measured response of real light transmission from real surfaces. In short, it simulated all those tiny bumps (boxes) on every square inch of the building surface. "When we started using the GGX shading model, the towers transformed from good-looking VFX metal to something far more realistic," says Baillie. This was important because the towers were taking on the environment around them. "Oen with movies, you focus on what is in camera. Anything above or below us we don't worry about," Baillie explains. "With the towers, we had to worry about what was above, below, and behind us because it was all a set and reflected in the buildings. We had to build the world in 360 degrees. The towers themselves depended on us building a realistic world around them. We couldn't think of the towers or New York on their own, but how they lived together in the same world." FILMMAKERS USED VARIOUS METHODS TO PORTRAY THE VERTIGO FEELING ON THE WIRE. BEFORE/AFTER IMAGES:: GO TO EXTRAS IN THE JANUARY.FEBRUARY 2016 ISSUE BOX C G W. C O M