The Pinky demon, a horrific creature still attached to a now battered wheel chair, was an entirely computer-generated character that was designed, built and animated by Framestore CFC.

The First Person Shooter sequence concludes with a head-to-head battle between Grim and the Pinky demon. “From the early stage, we opted to create the room that the section takes place in as a fully CG environment,” Keene explains. “While raising the challenge bar, it gave us the control over the lighting, architecture and objects within that room that our Pinky creature needed to interact with. The first stage was to block out and look down the overall animation of the creature along with the arms and legs of Grim and any weapons that he utilizes. Originally, we had planned on a 2D shoot of the live-action portions of Grim — hands, arms, legs — but, again, it proved better, despite the additional challenges, to create these in CG as well. Once we had the animation approved, we embarked on finalizing the room, the objects within and the lighting. Finally, we composited the whole scene and bolted it onto the end of the First Person Shooter sequence. As such, it was a 2,000 frame continuous, fully CG sequence that came after a very 2D, live-action visual effects sequence and, therefore, we had to make sure the look was right.”

Now You See It, Now You Don’t
While Framestore CFC focused on creature animation, artists at Double Negative were busy visualizing the facility and its futuristic technology. The main security feature of the facility is the nanowall technology, a system that turns a solid wall into a liquid surface and allows people to pass through. The concept took several months to nail down. CG supervisor Jesper Kjolsrud explains: “The director wanted more than a Stargate water effect. After exploring many different options, we opted for a concept in which particles in a wall formed hexagonal cells that could transform from fluid state to opaque and back. The rippling, liquid surfaces were created with displacement maps, using the fluid simulation program that we had written in Maya for Below and further developed for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The elements were then rendered out in our proprietary volumetric renderer, DNB, and composited with Shake.”

Although the CG animation worked perfectly in close-up, showing great detail, the effect appeared completely mushed together in wide shots. “The shots that we thought would be the easiest — long shots of the nanowalls — turned out to be the most difficult, as we didn’t have enough pixels to generate an equivalent of the animation that worked so well in close-ups,” visual effects producer Steve Garrad recalls. “It took a lot of tweaking to make this work. The same is true for the wormhole droplet — an interplanetary transportation system — and the plasma gun. These shots were very difficult to nail down from a design point of view. If you have to create a CG helicopter or a CG creature, you know when it looks real. You have real life equivalents to match to. However, when you are working on a nanowall, a wormhole or a plasma ray, there is no real life reference. Should it be greener or bluer? It all becomes completely subjective. We ended up working on those shots until the very last minute, just to make sure that they worked.”

Double Negative lets us into The Rock’s eye.

Full Power
Derived from the look that had been established in the game, the plasma ray gun effect was created (and rendered) in Maya in different layers. The core was a basic geometry that was surrounded by swirling fluid simulations and particle animations. Although interactive lighting had been created on set during plate photography, Double Negative’s artists added many extra light effects to ensure a better integration of the plasma ray animation in the environment. “For the shot of the plasma gun destroying a room, we shot two versions of the same set, one intact and one in which the walls and furniture were completely melted,” Kjolsrud recounts. “We then created a wipe between the two sets that was timed to the progression of the plasma ray in the room.”

Double Negative also created the opening shot of the movie. It begins with the traditional Universal Pictures logo, except that planet Earth has been replaced by a NASA photograph of Mars. The camera then flies down to the surface of the planet until it reaches the research facility. “For the first part of the shot, we used high-resolution images from NASA on which we applied displacement maps to created a three-dimensional effect,” Garrad observes. “As the camera went down, we switched to several layers of matte-paintings before arriving on a CG model of the facility. Using CGI instead of a practical miniature allowed us to make modifications and to improve the shot until the very last minute.”

For Nelmes, as for Kjolsrud and Garrad, Doom was a particularly fun project to work on as they all had played the game before. Studio executives now hope that those artists won’t be the only ones to enjoy the movie, and that Doom will soon join Tomb Raider and Resident Evil as a successful videogame adaptation, rather than fall into oblivion like Wing Commander and Alone in the Dark…

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 Cinéfex. He recently organized a major special effects exhibition at the Musée International de la Miniature in Lyon, France.