Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/77744
Character Animation n n n n At left, Imageworks' Arnold software produced final shots with realistic lighting. Above left to right: A digital city stands ready; animators could control each muscle; Spider-Man's suit sports fine textural detail. just enough so that it doesn't have a polished CG look." For lighting, Imageworks used Arnold to illuminate the characters and the city. "One of our challenges was to increase the depth and dimensionality for the environments because they shot the film in native stereo," Smith says. "And, because the Red Epic cameras capture so much detail." New York, New York The modelers and layout artists worked in tandem with the Imageworks crew on Men in Black 3 to create the digital buildings they needed in New York City. "We had extensive builds from projects in the past, but we do a lot of flying through and right next to build- ings in this film, so we had to lift everything up a notch," Smith says. Using data scanned from locations in New accurate the geometry, the more interesting the renders." Lighting artists used Imageworks' Katana to place light sources in the environment and then rendered the result with the studio's in- house version of Arnold. "The artists placed nearly every actual light source with the ex- ception of some room interiors," Smith says. "They placed up to 10,000 light sources. The end product is so beautiful. Light spills out from the storefronts onto the sidewalks. We see reflections of the lights on the cars, and from the cars back onto the buildings. It's all calculated in the renderer." Further bringing realism to the environ- York and from set photography, the model- ers created fine detail for important build- ings. "I think we had 38,000 reference stills," Smith says. "We had 100 percent CG shots of Spider- Man's upper chest to the top of his head and the building he clings onto; we get very close to the buildings." Geometry created for previous shows moved to the background; new buildings and sometimes upgraded previous buildings took center stage. "The modeling artists are very fast," Smith says. "They know what's efficient in our Arnold renderer and what kinds of things can benefit from true geometry rather than displacement. We also added room in- teriors, so we have full interiors for all the rooms in upward of 400 buildings. The more ment were a variety of simulations: subtle sim- ulations that added ash, dust, bugs, and other particles, as well as more typically dramatic explosions. "On previous shows, it would be unlikely to have more than 100 fluid simu- lations," Smith says. "This one had 1200 ef- fects passes with fluid simulations. We needed physically accurate volumes to play accurately in stereo 3D." Some of those volumes put the particulate matter—ash, bugs, dust—into the air. "We noticed small details, like dust, in the practical photography," Smith says. "The Red camera picks up that detail. So, we have little bits of things everywhere illuminated with dramatic lighting." To create the simulations, the team used Side Effects Software's Houdini tied into a proprietary network that feeds data into Ar- nold for rendering. In addition, they called on Maya and Imageworks' in-house software. Spinning the Web Houdini also helped the crew create Spider- Man's unusual web. "Marc [Webb] had a different take on what Spider-Man's webs look like," Chen says. "The webs in the pre- vious movies were biological; they came from Spider-Man himself. But in the comic book, Peter Parker is a mechanical genius who makes web shooters that use synthetically created bio-cable. When the web-shooter in our film fires, something almost like gunsmoke comes out. The web is a glass-like filament with tre- mendous detail so the edges catch highlights." tures made by artists using glue guns. "We found spider-web-like things and even chan- deliers," Smith says. "The thing that was neat about glue-gun art was its reflective/refractive quality." For reference, the effects team found sculp- how the web would move using a core strand in Maya. "From the main core strand, we send it through a Houdini pipeline that added geo- metric detail," Smith says. "The end splays out and grabs onto things. Lighting, rendering, and compositing gave it a final look." Com- positors worked in The Foundry's Nuke to pull the final shots together. In addition to Imageworks, Pixomondo Animators dictated the speed and timing of played a large role, creating, in particular, a sequence during which Spider-Man, in one of his first heroic actions, saves a boy from a burning van after an attack by the Lizard. "Pixomondo sent us their rendered bridge and water," Chen says. "And we shared composites between the two studios. As long as we shared lookup tables, the shots more or less matched. With 15 companies working on the movie, lots of facilities had to share assets, but Image- works did everything centric to Spider-Man, the Lizard, New York, and Oscorp." The challenge in this film was to give the franchise a fresh look, one that fit within the Spider-Man universe, yet was distinc- tive enough to win kudos from super-hero- sophisticated audiences. Visual effects played a huge role in making this more organic Spider- Man—and the film as a whole—believable. "If Andrew Garfield moves a certain way, you have to study that and understand what makes it memorable," Chen says. "You have to convey the same cues digitally. But, you also have to look at the entire movie—how it's ed- ited, the feeling of the whole visual vocabulary. You have to spot through lines [plot lines] and even talk about the colors of the digital city. Your effects have to fit in all that. If they stand out, they take you out of the movie." n Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net. June/July 2012 31