Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/997232
e d i t i o n 2 , 2 0 1 8 | c g w 1 3 ILM CREATED THE CG NEW YORK SKYLINE AND SENT THE VEHICLES ON A WILD RACE. V I R T U A L R E A L I T Y "Grady Cofer led that effort with assistance from Daniele Bigi." Cofer had been a fan of Ernest Cline's book long before he started working on the film. In fact, aer reading "Ready Player One" in 2012, he campaigned to be on any ILM crew that might ever work on a film based on the book. "I'm a product of the '80s," he says. "I loved all the '80s references, and it refer- ences so many movies that ILM helped create. I said that ILM should be part of it; I knew we could create something unique." During pre-production, Cofer spent time at Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment helping develop storyboards and previs with first, The Third Floor, and then Scott Meadows at Digital Domain and Shirk at ILM. Once shots started, he moved to ILM's London studio. "The OASIS as imagined by Ernie Cline is a completely virtual utopian escape from a dystopian reality," Cofer says. "A key aspect of translating the book to the screen is world building. What does it look like? Feel like? ILM created the entire OASIS and its inhabitants, so every aspect had to be designed and built in the computer. We created 63 fully-dressed, distinct environ- ments. We had to create and use propri- etary tools to be able to work with these massive environments quickly." ILM's Metropolis tools, first deployed on the animated feature Rango, helped with set dressing. "We used Metropolis to populate Aech's garage with a massive amount of detail," Cofer says. "Imagine the biggest mechan- ic's garage you've ever seen, on steroids. One of the fun parts of this show is the Easter eggs, and we have tons all over the garage. Tools you might have in a workshop. Machines. All sorts of stuff. We wanted to give audiences the same thrill as they would have reading the book." ILM artists had created every location needed for performance capture to a level that would represent that world well in real time, and sent the environments to Roberts' virtual production team at Digital Domain, where they were turned into re- al-time assets. Then, aer filming, the data came back for shots Spielberg approved. "That was helpful from a layout stand- point and when the characters were interacting with something," says Barry Williams, global environment supervisor. "We would match what was directly around the characters. But otherwise, everything was redone aer the shoot. People change their minds. Oen, what might have been intended on the day of the shoot needed to change aer the fact." And other environments needed to be built, as well. For the New York race – the first challenge Wade enters, Spielberg shot Sheridan (Parzival/Wade) in a motion-cap- ture suit "driving" a DeLorean set piece. Otherwise, there was little motion capture for the race. Similarly, the introduction to the OASIS happened largely in the digital world with little motion capture. A visual development team spread over ILM's four studios moved 2D concept art into the 3D world as quickly as possible for Spielberg's initial approval before modelers worked on final models. To help modelers work with the massive environ- ments, the ILM tools group developed a new proprietary "nesting" tool. The tool nested layers with increasing levels of details inside sets so that, for example, an artist could zoom into a street and neigh- borhood in New York City, turn a corner, see another nested set, and dive into its increasing levels of detail. "We built over 900 assets – creatures, ships, cars, and so on," Cofer says. "Not 900 models total. I'm talking about assets we tracked. Set dressing and props were another level. I discovered that on a typical visual effects movie when I ask an artist to model a car, the artist does a diligent job. On this movie, I asked for the DeLorean from Back to the Future, or the Iron Giant, and other iconic assets. The modelers went bananas. It was a labor of love." The environment artists worked diligent- ly, one layer at a time, adding detail aer detail, getting approvals along the way, and tracking rendering times as they worked, to know how much data they could add. ILM's set dressing and layout teams tend to use the studio's Zeno to check models in, move them around, place props, and so forth. Modelers use Maya, 3ds Max, and various third-party apps. "Our bread-and-butter rendering goes in two places," Williams says. "We have Katana with RenderMan RIS or 3ds Max and V-Ray. We use a lot of packages to create and assemble the environments. Where it gets pushed will be into either our mainline side when there's a lot of in- teraction with characters; that's Katana and RIS. Or, if the shots are mostly about the environment, we might go to Max and