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n n n n Visual Effects Medusa’s head transforms from a snake to a beautiful woman with snaky hair, and back again. Animators at Framestore controlled the timing of the morph and the individual snakes. age the scales,” Webber says. “She was quite a technical challenge. She doesn’t have any dia- log, but we needed to give her facial expres- sions based on Vodianova, so we had a full-on facial animation rig.” When Medusa petrifies people, her head changes from a beautiful woman to a scary snake. “We had two models in 3D, both ani- matable,” Webber says. “Tey had to morph one to the other, so the model could change, the textures could change, and the skin surface parameters could change. Tey didn’t all change at the same time.” Hints of the snaky face re- mained, for example, when she morphed back to a human. Animators controlled the timing for the morph and for the snakes. “We considered procedural techniques for the snakes, but ended up doing a lot of hand animation,” Webber says. “Tey had very in- dividual behavior.” Hades, too, sometimes looks human and other times a dark essence. He first appears as long streams that flow through a crowd and join together to form a spout of black vapor with fire inside. Te spout becomes a tornado that sucks soldiers inside and then spins into Hades in his human—Ralph Fiennes—form wearing a cloak. Te cloak’s edges are on fire. For the dark essence, Framestore effects art- ists used Maya and Side Effects’ Houdini, plus volumetric rendering. “It worked differently in different shots,” Webber says. “We had thin tendrils, a giant column of smoke, tiny wisps, 22 April 2010 a big spout like a fountain, so we used Maya fluids, but mostly Houdini. For the spout, we used different types of fluid solves and then ran particles through it.” Twice during the film, Hades and the Har- pies morph into each other. Te first time, the Harpies attack soldiers and then fly together into a spinning ball. Te spinning ball be- comes the dark essence that, as it slows down, turns into Hades’ cape. Te cape opens, and we see Ralph Fiennes, who was a bluescreen element. Animators manipulated the black Harpies into the spinning ball; particle simu- lations turned the ball into smoke. Te second transition starts with Hades. When he flicks his cape forward, the cape breaks apart and each part becomes a Harpy. To make this possible, modelers built the cape with separate panels. Animators moved the parts away from Hades, and then effects artists ran a cloth simulation that responded to the animation. A 2D morph turned the pieces of cape into Harpies. In addition to the creatures, Framestore also created several environments—the witches’ mountain, set extensions for Medusa that in- cluded caverns with boiling lava and a temple on a hillside, the misty landscape around the River Styx, but the most notable and biggest environment is Olympus. “In the opening shots of the movie, we have a massive fly- through of Olympus,” Webber points out. “We come down through a huge dome filled with tiny statues of humans, fly over a map on the floor and out through a corridor, and then up into the clouds. We based one establishing shot of the exterior on a helicopter plate taken from up in the clouds. Another was complete- ly CG—the clouds, the waterfalls, the moun- tain, the plants.” For environments, Framestore typically cre- ates geometry and projects textures in Maya using procedural-generation techniques for natural landscapes. “We also did matte paint- ings and used basic projections in [Te Found- ry’s] Nuke, and built fully CG stuff with tex- tures, lights, shaders, all completely CG,” Webber says. For rendering, the team used Pixar’s RenderMan and, for the fly-through of the interior, Mental Images’ Mental Ray. Knowing that shots would take place in the interior, Framestore was prepared to build set extensions for the throne room and the corridor leading there. On set, the floor had a marble map of the earth to illustrate the gods’ power over the planet. But later, this didn’t seem oth- erworldly enough. “We replaced it with some- thing much bigger,” Webber says, “a photoreal earth with a moving sea, mountains, forests, and floating clouds. Te gods walked through the atmosphere. Tey had clouds at their ankles.” After some concern that audiences might wonder whether the gods would tread on villages as they walked, the artists decided to make the scene less real. “We made it very cloudy to distract people from worrying about those issues,” Webber explains. “Te whole place became a glowing atmospheric place with swirling clouds. We enhanced the gods’