Beowulf has lots of geometric and textural details. Just look at the face, the hair and the clothes. 

“When we started talking about how to do Beowulf, we didn’t know that we were going to go this realistic and detailed -- that evolved over time,” Chen continues. “The evolution of that was predicated by the motion capture performances of the characters and how the keyframe animation was applied on top of them. As we looked at these characters, we realized that we wanted more and more detail on the faces, on the clothes, on the world. The performances of the characters were so big in scope. We noticed that these faces needed more muscle detail, more texture in the eyes, eyelashes to have certain detail, the hair on the head needed to be more detailed. It got to the point with Hrothgar that we wanted to get so close that we could see hair in his ears and nostrils. And then when the light hit the side of his face, we wanted to see peach fuzz.”

Beowulf (left) and Grendel (right) were challenges. Beowulf looked nothing like the actor who portrays him while Imageworks used RenderMan shaders for Grendel’s skin. 

For Beowulf, Imageworks developed new human facial, body and cloth tools. Beowulf was a challenge, of course, because he looks nothing like Winstone and is portrayed at different ages. “Grendel is another interesting character,” Chen suggests. “We were originally going to keyframe him, but Bob wanted to use Crispin Glover to capture his tortured soul. The intent was to make him look like a giant mutant child suffering from every known skin disease. We had to dial him back so he didn’t look like a corpse using new RenderMan shaders for the look of the skin. Because he’s 12-feet tall, the animators had to create a different sense of timing, height and momentum but stay true to the performance.”

According to MoCap Supervisor Demian Gordon, they initially pushed the volume during the capture sessions. “We maintained the height and captured 16-21 person shots. We used a much higher marker count, so we had full hands on Beowulf for the first time. We also had a high-res face on Beowulf for the first time. Our ability to see markers improved and had less cameras overall. We used 250 Vicon cameras with custom software for Sony that only four people in the world know how to run. We had 18 capture systems wired together in one super system.

“Because of the nature of Beowulf and so many people in the volume in the Mead Hall or during the dragon battle, it required us to come up with an elegant solution for keeping track of various props. No props were captured on Monster House but all of them were on Beowulf. We color-coded every prop so you could tell what you were seeing in the video reference. If there were 16 swords in the video, you needed to know which particular CG asset went with that physical prop. Everything that went into or came out of the volume, we bar-coded. We had the equivalent of a grocery clerk checking all the data. File sizes went through the roof, with all these extra markers, so we made a complex system of slave PCs that listen for every capture and when each capture is done they chop it up into manageable bits and then process them and piece them back together. Even so, we had to hack into Windows to deal with the large data sizes. We had to stream data in one big chunk with a lot of automated processors, but in the end it’s very organic kind of filmmaking that you get because the actors perform and then Bob gets to execute his vision without being aware of all the things we’ve implemented on the backend.”