Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/77744
n n n n Invisible Effects dered down the street at 40 to 50 miles per hour. They could drive it in a straight line and swerve down the street, but it wasn't so good going around corners, and it couldn't fly." The hydraulic arm could push the Bat up- ward 10 or 12 feet on location. Later, to make it look like it was flying, the artists at Double Negative painted out the support vehicle and hydraulic arm. But, when the Bat really need- ed to maneuver, the digital artists took the wheel of a CG machine. In the shot, Bane's forces have taken con- trol of various military vehicles that Wayne enterprises had built, and they use these to fire heat-sensing missiles at the Bat. "Batman has to take off in an aerial sequence, weaving with a fantastic new system based on [Pixar's] RenderMan 16 with custom shading, and our own lighting tools in a system we call Rex. The physically-based renderer correctly calculates bouncing and the conservation of energy as light rays bounce around the scene." Previously, to fit a digital Batmobile into scenes for Dark Knight, the artists graded each surface of the vehicle. "We judged everything by eye," Franklin says. "Does this match the reference shadows? Are the highlights too hot?" For this film, the combination of [HDRI] lighting maps, reference photography, render- ing software, and artistic skill gave Franklin digital vehicles that behaved in a consistent manner. "We could give the rendering team an the movement and believability of the vehicle, rather than thinking about the nuts and bolts that go into making sure it is realistically lit," Franklin says. "It meant we could say to Chris [Nolan], 'I can bring this thing right into camera at full resolution, have it linger there, and it will look good.' And, it gave Chris the confidence that we could pull off the high- resolution, complicated things he had filmed. The big climactic scenes are in full daylight in this film, so we really pushed our rendering and lighting to the full limit." Explosive Details One of the biggest sequences involving digi- tal visual effects takes place in the Pittsburgh through the streets and around the rooftops to evade the missiles," Franklin says. "We couldn't use the physical machine up there." For these shots, Double Negative artists in- serted the CG Bat into backgrounds compos- ited from aerial plates shot in Pittsburgh and New York. "They matched perfectly," Franklin says. "The team at Double Negative came up 24 June/July 2012 animation, and a render would come back the next day that was a pretty seamless match with- out any secondary grading," he says. "It was a huge time-saver. I might say an object needed to be brighter or darker, but I didn't have to grade each surface of the object." The impact rippled beyond convenience. "It meant we could spend more time on Steelers' Heinz Field, which stars as Gotham Stadium in the film. Given Nolan's propensity to film everything in camera, he persuaded 15,000 people to dress in winter clothes in the middle of the summer and sit in the stands. That worked for some shots, but there weren't enough fans to fill the 65,000-capacity stadium for the wide shots of the field exploding.