Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/815991
10 cgw m a r c h . a p r i l 2 0 1 7 "We shot aerials around the limestone karsts in [Vietnam's] Ha Long Bay," White says. "It was spectacular." The Monarch team drops explosives into the jungle below to supposedly get seismic readings. But, the attack angers Kong, who sends a palm tree through one helicopter, and then grabs two helicopters in his fists, bangs them together, and tosses them to the ground. Within a short while, he's crashed all the helicopters. ILM artists created the nearly all-CG sequence with live-action and digital actors. It sets up a journey by two teams of survivors across the sometimes digital island to meet rescue he- licopters; one team determined to kill Kong, the other to simply survive. "It was a great show overall for environ- ments," White says. "When you have a 100-foot creature shot anamorphic, you're going to miss the framing a lot of time. So, we did set extensions and built a few fully digital environments, especial- ly for the final battle. Our environment supervisor, Susumu Yukuhiro, came to Vietnam with us." Much of that final battle takes place in a marsh surrounded by mountains. To create the digital environments, the crew scanned, measured, and tracked the areas in Vietnam's Van Long nature preserve using a FARO Focus 3D scanner. Yukuhiro also took photographs and cycloramas. "To get to our sets, we had to ride in small boats through caves," White says. "We had the scanner on a barge. It was really tricky not having a stable platform, so we looked for shallow areas where we could put the tripod down in the water to get as clean a scan as possible. But, having those scans helped us lay out the size of the mountains." On set, the crew used ILM's Cineview, an iPad application with which the director and cinematographer could see digital creatures composited into the natural environment. ILM's Tim Alexander had first used the app for Jurassic World. For this film, the team added a matting feature. "That was really useful," White explains. "The iPad camera gave us the background, and Cineview put Kong over it. So, if Kong is 50 feet away, we could see how high we'd have to tilt the camera to get his face. But, when he's 200 feet away, it's hard in this natural environment to understand how tall he would be. So, we could paint a quick matte to put him behind whatever in the landscape would be in the foreground. The nice thing was that we could take the iPad anywhere – even on a boat." BUILDING THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENTS Artists in ILM's San Francisco, Vancouver, and Singapore studios worked on the environ- ments, about 15 artists in all, who extended sets, created completely CG environments, and replaced footage shot in Hawaii. "In Hawaii, you see palm trees like we have on the West Coast," Yukuhiro says. "The places we went to in Vietnam had trees that are kind of shaped like palm trees, but they're banana trees. And the mountains are more rocky and mossy than Hawaii's jungle-covered mountains. This is one of the very rare shows in which most of the environment work was purely organic." To create the digital environments, the artists used matte paintings, 2.5D projec- tions, and 3D geometry. The tens of thou- sands of photographs Yukuhiro took while in Vietnam were reference for the environment artists, used as projections onto cards, and became the basis for the matte paintings. The cyclorama helped artists create the background environment for the final battle. "The easiest way to change the envi- ronments was by using the photographs," Yukuhiro says. "But when we had 3D camera moves, we had to make CG environments. For that, we used [Isotropix's] Clarisse to assemble, set dress, light, and render the scenes. We had successfully used Clarisse for the first time on The Force Awakens, and we really wanted to push it for this show. Votch Levi was the Clarisse tech lead, and he wrote so many amazing tools to integrate Clarisse into our main pipeline." Speedtree soware helped the artists build more than 150 unique trees. "Now- adays people know what Speedtree trees look like, so we customized them with hand modeling or added extra geometry to make them look slightly different," Yukuhiro says. TDs in the creature development depart- ment (creature dev) could use the rig creat- ed in Speedtree to simulate tree movement and character interaction with the trees. A proprietary system moved the Speedtree rig through ILM's Zeno pipeline. "We could identify which trees would be hero trees so creature dev could simu- late only those trees," Yukuhiro says. "For shots with a lot of interaction with trees, animators would add trees and bushes as placeholders. Then the environment art- ists would place the hero trees and send those trees to the creature developers." To scatter grass and distribute other KONG RAGES AS THE MONARCH TEAM DROPS EXPLOSIVES FROM HELICOPTERS INTO HIS ISLAND JUNGLE.