Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/863766
j u ly . a u g u s t 2 0 1 7 c g w 3 1 F E A T U R E taking what we learned and applying it to new shows. But it is especially exciting when you can come back and work with some of the characters you are familiar with, that you love, and are able to put more energy and attention into them," says Lemmon. "Also, our core technology continues to advance. We are always thrilled to be able to make updates and tell a new story, to put the char- acters into a new space and get them to look even better by improving their fur and the way the light hits them. In this movie, in par- ticular, we beat up Caesar pretty badly; he takes a number of cuts and scrapes and hits. The variation in textural detail and changes over the course of the movie far exceed what we did on previous films." There are approximately 1,450 visual effects shots in the film – many a minute or more in length – all which were handled by Weta, with the exception of some marker removals, paint-outs, the addition of blood (by Blur Studio), and previs/postvis (Halon). "The movie runs just over two hours, and almost every shot has visual effects," says Lemmon. "The apes are in almost every shot. There's also so much in terms of worldbuilding." Facial Makeover It goes without saying that the Weta facial animation team is well acquainted with these characters and has a deep under- standing of them and how to get them to express their emotions. "We are very clear that the success of the film hinges on us matching the performance of the actors. It's incumbent on us to make sure their perfor- mance comes through," says Barrett. The updates to the base models of the recurring characters were subtle and mainly extended to the aging of Caesar – deeper wrinkling and added creases in his face, more gray in his hair and beard – before the addition of scars of war. And just as they did on the previous Apes films, the artists continued to adjust Caesar's model and fa- cial rig based on what they had learned on the previous production and the ever-grow- ing complexity of the performances and facial expressions. "This movie contains some of the finest facial performance for Caesar that we have ever done on a digital character. He goes places he hasn't gone before emotionally, and Andy Serkis put in a stellar perfor- mance; he played the role with such sophis- tication and subtlety," says Lemmon. "There is a lot of conflict in this film, and Caesar goes through a lot of internal struggle. For us, Andy set a high bar as to what Caesar could do and emotionally where he would go. We had to get all that complicated overlapping of various emotions and layers of subtext to come across in Caesar's face." And just as the requirements for believ- able emotional digital performances grew, so have Weta's facial animation tools to support that work. Weta still used the same single-camera facial-capture setup for War as it had for the previous films. They also used a similar way of building the face pup- pets, as many were reused as a base starting point for this film. In the past, though, the team built the faces and heads in Autodesk's Maya, but the evaluation was slow. For War, Weta devised a new way to build the puppets outside of Maya in soware called Koru. That, com- bined with Weta's own custom viewport within Maya, called Gazebo (built upon a fast OpenGL platform), gave the group incredible speed for executing complex and precise facial animation decisions. Receiving instant feedback resulted in a more intuitive direct manipulation model, giving anima- tors the power and control to re-create any expression they saw in an actor's perfor- mance. And this extended beyond the hero character to the hundreds of characters in a scene. "We got some good speed improvements and were carrying the full-resolution, full face puppets in the scenes, which is a great help when you can see your animation and be confident that what you see is what will be rendered ultimately," says Barrett. "I think we were above real time even with two charac- ters on screen, displayed at full resolution." (TOP) NEW TO THE SERIES IS BAD APE (STEVE ZAHN). (BOTTOM) CAESAR (ANDY SERKIS) RETURNS IN HIS LEAD ROLE.