Rising Sun Pictures created over 150 shots for Australia, including animating the cattle for the drove. Courtesy of RSP. All images ™ & © 2008 Twentieth Century Fox.

Baz Luhrmann's Australia sweeps across the wild brush of the outback with all the romance and scope of a classic Hollywood epic.

But telling the tale of romance in and with the outback required the expertise of 10 visual effects houses to bring to life the droving cattle, a raging stampede and a World War II battlefield -- all under tight deadlines.

Starring Hugh Jackman as the Drover and Nicole Kidman as English aristocrat Sarah Ashley, the Twentieth Century Fox film stayed in-country to create its droving cattle and the port city of Darwin.

Luhrmann tapped Rising Sun Pictures, based in Sydney and Adelaide, to create more than 150 shots for the film, including animating the cattle for the drove sequences using the facility's in-house crowd system, Posse.

CG Supervisor Carsten Kolve says that when Rising Sun started on the project 18 months ago, it evaluated all the crowd system options and stuck with Posse.

"We basically decided the amount of work that it takes to integrate it into our pipeline might as well be spent investing into our own infrastructure and bringing that up to speed and then not having to deal with issues like high license costs," he explains.

Posse also was already tied into Venom, Rising Sun's in-house 3D infrastructure. Venom's ability to let visual effects artists create geometry as late as the render phase provided the kind of flexibility the project required, Kolve adds.

"We're dealing with just skeletons most of the time directly in Maya and then, when it comes to render time, we would actually bind the skeleton with the geometry applied the shader and render the complete individual cow or many of them on demand, which made the whole rendering process very efficient," he says.

Posse works with a concept called "crowd containers." On Australia, for example, a library of crowd "building blocks" was assembled that includes rigs, shaders and deformers that would then be assembled and used to fill a 3D space.

"It gave us faster turnaround in producing those shots and much more important it made it possible to uses reuse those building blocks in different shots over and over again or even in the same shot," Kolve says.

Work began with one main animator producing most of the cattle animations. For reference, Rising Sun shot some of the real cattle used on location in a studio with a bluescreen setup. Kolve says they shot the cattle trotting, stopping, cantering and milling about from a number of different angles to create the base reference for the animation.

Control over all the elements was maintained through to the lighting stage. Kolve says the lighters would receive a complete assembly from the crowd TD that consisted solely of a huge cache of animated skeletons that gave the lighters complete control over variations in color, texture and placement.

It also gave lighters the ability to change any element necessary, up to adding, altering, deleting or moving specific cattle from a shot. "We wouldn't have to go all the way back to the simulation stage. The lighters could just pull out a particular cow," says VFX Supervisor Kat Szuminska.

Cows' appearances were easily adjusted. Out on the desert, they were made to look skinnier and when times were good they were fattened up, according to Szuminska.