Congratulations!
On 7/15/2013 3:07 PM, Alan Fregtman wrote:
Hey guys,
A lot of people say Softimage doesn't get used much in movies, so I
personally love to hear stories when it does happen. Therefore, I
wanted to share some details with you. :)
I'm the lead rigger at /Rodeo FX/ http://rodeofx.com and we did all of
the interiors of the control pods (the cockpits, that is), including
the visors, foot actuators & mechanical stilts, some digidoubles, etc.
(except the holograms/UI graphics that were done by the folks at
Hybride.) We also had the chance of doing our first organic creature,
the brain in the lab (which involved a lot of "gross" ICE
deformations), as well as many beautiful matte paintings and a couple
of helicopters.
Overall, we did over a hundred shots. CG was done in Softimage and as
far as I know it was all rendered in our favourite renderer, Arnold!
We'd still be rendering today if Mentalray had been used. :p We threw
countless ~8k textures with displacement and stupid amounts of
topology, and good ol' Arnie performed like a champ.
The stilts (the leg controls in the cockpit) had anything from 1500 to
2500 separate meshes and on average about 150 segments (solid groups
of parts that moved as one.) Once we identified the "segments" by the
end we had a rig of Arnold stand-ins with each segment saved as one
ass file, and low-res geo representing that segment constrained to
some part of the rig. It then became relatively "light" to have the
standins rigged instead of the full raw geo, and it made it quite easy
to replace parts or textures later in the pipeline during or after
animation. (Also caching was a piece of cake in this scenario, as we
only needed to plot the segment nulls instead of thousands of meshes
or pointcaching anything.)
On the brain there was procedural pulsing animation driven by ICE
deformers. Globules would "breathe", a heart-like organ would pump its
ventricles intermittently and an intestine-like organ flowed with
bulges travelling along its tract. It was gross and (in my opinion)
kind of awesome. lol Speaking of ICE, there was a kind of lettuce
behind the brain that was also moving a bit. The modeling was done
with strips that were procedurally curled and then if I remember
correctly the whole thing was driven via Syflex as the brain gently
floated. This lettuce thing was handled by another guy on this mailing
list, my coworker and friend Jonathan Laborde. Maybe if he's reading
this he can give more details of how he used ICE in a few other shots.
It was crazy fun project to work on. Fingers crossed that Pacific Rim
2 becomes a reality. :) Anyway, did you guys go see it? What'd you think?
Oh and speaking of other movies, we did a ton of work in "Now You See
Me" as well, including hundreds of stadium dudes with our propietary
ICE static crowd system, falling/flying money, cg bubbles, an
art-directed liquid, lockpicking, flying cards, many vehicles, the
projected motiongraphics near the end and a few invisible fx. (I feel
like I probably missed something, but anyway, we did a lot.) We were
the main vfx vendor on that film, delivering just over 20 minutes
worth of vfx "magic" (pun intended.) Again, Soft & Arnold and lots of
effects in ICE all throughout.
Cheers,
-- Alan
