Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/77744
VFX•CG Films n n n n Wallace, our lead texture painter, wanted to use [Th e Foundry's] Mari," Hahn says. "He was completely convinced that he would get faster iterations and maintenance would be better without needing much support around it. One of my jobs is to do exactly that—to support people trying something new, and it turned out that the artists really were able to spend less time with that tool." A second decision moved the team to an al- and subsurface and transmissive qualities. Th e crew stayed with Katana, a program pha release of Side Eff ects Software's Houdini 12. "We wanted to take advantage of the sup- port for GPU simulations," Hahn says. "Our lead eff ects TD Th eo Vandernoot thought it was the only way to achieve the detail Jay [Redd] and Ken [Ralston] were looking for. developed in-house for lighting and compos- iting, but used it only for lighting, switching to Th e Foundry's Nuke for compositing. For color management, the team used Open Col- or I/O. "We had sequences shot in two for- mats—fi lm and digital," Hahn says. "And, the color space is diff erent, so we used Open Col- or I/O to ingest and output consistent color." For a shot in which one of the charac- ters shoots several prison guards through a hole in the wall, Senior Technical Ani- mator Josh Ochoa used NaturalMotion's Endorphin."Endor phin is stunt-simulation software with ragdoll physics," explains Spen- only added a few eye blinks here and there, and made antennas move, but otherwise, his bodysuits and masks stood. We didn't do any CG for period aliens. For the 2012 aliens, Rick created designs for some aliens that we did fully CG, and we also added eye blinks to his creatures." In addition to digital doubles for Agents J and K, the animators wrestled with an alien fi sh that Agent J fi ghts in a Chinese restau- rant, gave the restaurant owner a slug-like lower body, created a small talking fi sh, turned a head into a bowling ball, and digitally en- hanced Boris, the alien criminal and villain in the fi lm. "In the past, I'd worked mostly on crea- Imageworks artists referenced a sea lion to create the largest digital alien in the fi lm. (Right) Before (top) and after (bottom) the creature lands in the sequence. For the same amount of computation time that a 50 x 50 x 50 grid took with the Maya fl uid solver and our in-house solvers before, we could get 32 times the detail. Before, we would have done cheats and workarounds to get the quality level, but it wouldn't have been A+ level. And, Side Eff ects was great. Th ey helped us get some kinks ironed out of the alpha version, and it saved us a lot of time. Th e entire direction for visual eff ects is to go into actual physical simulations rather than emulations." Th at move toward actual physical simu- lations was true for lighting and for some of the crowd animation in this fi lm, as well. For lighting, the team switched to Arnold and from C to the OSL open-shading language. "We tried to do everything as physically based as possible," Hahn says. "With Arnold, the way light be- haves and reacts is more physically accurate. We get natural falloff s, shadows, color bleeds, cer Cook, animation super visor. "You can ap- ply forces to human forms. For this shot, Josh changed the direction of gravity so from the camera angle, it looks like the guards are be- ing pulled out of the hole, but basically they are falling toward the hole. We did a number of layers in Endorphin and gave each guard his own motion, so they looked alive. We'd run the simulations then export them into Maya so the animators could keyframe on top. It's like motion capture in a way. Th e fi les come in with keyframes on every frame." Animating Aliens All told, 27 animators worked on 15 diff er- ent characters in the fi lm, many of which were one-off s. "In the beginning, we thought we' Baker's makeup eff ects more than we ended up doing," Redd says. "But, we didn't change the period aliens that he did very much. We d blend our digital techniques with Rick tures and superheroes in serious action mov- ies," Cook says. "So for me, this movie was an interesting lesson in fi lm comedy. Barry [Sonnenfeld] is such a great comedy direc- tor." Cook gives an example using a shot with the CG worm guys, little creatures that were popular aliens from the previous two Men in Black fi lms. Th e shot takes place during a funeral with eight worm guys—four play one bagpipe, four sing a sad song. "We thought we could go big and really ham it up," Cook says. "Barry had us tone down the performances. It was too obvious we were trying to be funny. His approach to comedy is that you play it serious. You don't overdo it. Let the audiences decide if it's funny or not." Similarly, by not overdoing the beheading, animators turned a potentially scary idea into comedy. "Th e head almost looks like a real person—it has hair, ears, and a face, and it's June/July 2012 53 Images ©2012 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. Courtesy Sony Pictures Imageworks.