CG supervisor Shadi Almassizadeh and his team at The Orphanage produced 37 shots including, a monorail train that was made to look like it was manufactured out of bones and resin and futuristic interiors. Courtesy of The Orphange.

Power of 10
Parallel to Digital Domain’s effort, the production commissioned The Orphanage to produce 37 shots. Visual effects supervisor Jonathan Rothbart and CG supervisor Shadi Almassizadeh created a monorail train that was made to look like it was manufactured out of bones and resin. “We first looked at reference to find out what bones that big would look like,” Almassizadeh remarks. “So, we researched huge dinosaur bones. By comparing the head of a t-rex to the concept of the monorail, we created a tangible reference. The next step was creating the correct shader that accounted for the porous bone material. We observed that the t-rex head had some transmission of light through it, which made the shaded parts of the bone more luminant than they would have been if they were made out of stone. All the shader work was done in 3ds Max and rendered in Brazil. Using the Brazil Advance Material, we added a sub-surface scattering solution to the shader to achieve the transmission effect.”

Late in post-production, the ending was changed to include the crash of the Relical, which led to 28 last minute visual effects shots being assigned to Hydraulx. Courtesy of Hydraulx.

The company also created the city of Bregna in two spectacular powers of 10 shots that reveal its jungle surroundings. “We didn’t have enough time to build out an entire city in full 3D,” Almassizadeh continues. “So, we decided to use multiple matte paintings nested inside each other. We also assigned multiple technical directors to work with our matte painters to provide them with the 3D geometry in which the paintings were projected onto.”

Crafting a CG Crash
Late in post-production, the ending was completely modified to include the crash of the Relical, which led to 28 last minute visual effects shots being assigned to Hydraulx. “The Relical was a polygon model provided by production,” recalls visual effects supervisor Greg Strause. “The primary animation of the Relical and any items it collided with was all key framed — no rigid body dynamics were used. We used this technique in Day After Tomorrow for the scene where a large piece of ice breaks off the ice shelf. In our experience, talented animators can get great results faster and in a more precise way than by relying on simulations. In this case, it proved to be the fastest way to get the results that worked best for the locked cut we were working towards. For the secondary animation of the Relical reacting to collisions, we used Syflex cloth simulations. Since the fabric tear was pre-modeled into the geometry, we had to use a “pinning” rig to keep it closed until the collision ripped it open. The animators simply had to key frame the pins releasing, and the tear would open and ripple via a Syflex cloth simulation.”

The city itself was built from a digital asset provided by the production. However, the file did not provide the level of detail necessary for shots in which the buildings needed to appear up close in camera. So, a team of modelers created new datasets of high-resolution polygonal architecture. In order to optimize render times, the backside of the buildings was deleted and lower resolution models were used for background structures.

Throughout the sequence, Aeon is a digital character. “Production sent us a highly detailed Maya file of Aeon, but the UV’s were incomplete, and we had to start the texturing process from scratch,” Strause recalls. “We used high resolution stills that were provided by production, and projected them onto the model in several steps. The final texture was touched up in 3D paint in Maya and Photoshop. Then, our proprietary rigging techniques were applied to the model, and CG supervisor Chris Wells turned it over to our character department. The animation was all key-framed, but we had to tackle the issue that Aeon was grabbing on to a piece of cloth for several of our shots. This required simulating the cloth first, and then using this as a basis for Aeon’s performance.” The layers were finally composited in Inferno.

“We had two significant challenges on this sequence,” recalls Strause. “One was time — we only had six weeks for the entire sequence, start to finish. The other was the scope — we had to create a complete 3D city from scratch, rig and texture the 3D model of Aeon, tune the blocking of the sequence and then prep physical specs for a miniature elements shoot (realized by New Deal Studios). Considering all this, we’re very pleased with how everything turned out.”

Alain Bielik is the founder and special effects editor of renowned effects magazine S.F.X, published in France since 1991. He also contributes to various French publications and occasionally to Cinefex. He recently organized a major special effects exhibition at the Musée International de la Miniature in Lyon, France.