Final Destination 3 begins with the mother of all rides. All roller coaster images courtesy of Meteor Studios. All images © 2006 Shane Harvey/New Line Productions.

The first one started — literally — with a bang: an airplane blowing up during take-off. The sequel opened on a far more ambitious scale with an intricately designed pile-up on a freeway. For the third Final Destination movie (opening Feb. 10 from New Line), co-writer and director James Wong wanted to go even further with an opening sequence that would, this time, entirely rely on visual effects.

At the beginning of the sequence, a teenager has a premonition of a fatal roller coaster accident at an amusement park. She manages to convince her friends to get out of the ride on time, which saves their life. But Death doesn’t accept to be cheated and soon, tries to reclaim the life of the survivors in a series of dramatic “accidents”…

All the death scenes required varying degrees of 2D and 3D enhancements. The roller coaster sequence alone comprised 144 vfx shots, more than a third of the total (340) vfx shot count. “In a perfect world, we would have found a real roller coaster that suited our needs and shot most our plates on it,” overall visual effects supervisor Ariel Velasco-Shaw relates. “But it didn’t exist… So we decided to capture the exposition plates at a much smaller roller coaster that we digitally extended. In some shots, we dropped the horizon line. In other shots, we rotoscoped the carts and integrated them into a CG background. However, all the ‘action’ shots were photographed on green screen with single carts or multiple carts mounted on rigs, suspended on bungees, etc.”

CG supervisors Claude Precourt (pictured) and Joey Lessard, along with vfx supervisor Tim Stevenson, led one of Meteor’s two teams. They focused on the roller coaster sequence.

The Mother of All Rides
The sequence was assigned to Meteor Studios, where visual effects supervisor Tim Stevenson oversaw the project, with CG supervisors Joey Lessard and Claude Precourt handling the 3D effects. The coaster was custom-designed based on the events described in the script: sharp turn, followed by a steep drop, leading to a loop, etc. Most of the model was hand-built, with some MEL scripts helping out for specific elements. These included a “Closest Point On Surface” node to help position the tracks’ supporting brackets.

“A few custom techniques and tools were developed to streamline the process of going from layout to lighting,” Claude Precourt explains. “One of the difficulties of this project was that we could not film the actors in movement, on real roller coaster tracks. So, using the previsualization as a reference, we animated the camera as the inverse of the movement of the carts. We gave these animations as a reference to the team on the set whose job was to recreate — by hand — those camera moves with the real carts and the actors. The carts were static, but were bent to the right arc, again according to our references. When the filmed plates came back to us, all we had to do was to matchmove the camera and transfer the animation to the carts, most of the time by eye. That was still a little tricky, but overall far less expensive than having six carts on individual, computerized, gimbals and having to track them all individually afterward.”

Parts of the roller coaster structure were built with shading variables, so they could be used in multiple places in the ride. As a result, a single, small chunk of RIB associated with a piece could be dynamically loaded at render time, saving CPU cycles as well as memory.

Meteor Studios created 18 digital doubles for dangerous shots. First they modeled a generic and applied it to a cyberscan of each actor. They then created animation cycles, which gave the layout and lighting teams instant choices.

Crafting CG Victims
For shots that couldn’t possibly be photographed with a real performer, Meteor Studios employed digital doubles. “Every actor had a corresponding CG double,” Claude Precourt recounts. “We started by modeling a generic digital double. Once the UVs were unwrapped, we took this generic geometry and applied it to the cyberscan of each actor. We used this technique to generate 18 different digital doubles, each of them with the same geometry and an initial UV set. We then tweaked each of the doubles until we were all satisfied with the result. For many shots where they were seen in the distance, we had them sat in and constrained to the carts. We then created a few animation behavior cycles of the group (relaxed, scared, panicked), so that the layout and lighting teams could bring that up and have a completely animated scene in minutes. The behavior, as well as the specific animations, was hand animated. No motion capture was used. Maya Cloth was used on some characters, but most of the cloth movement was generated by a wave deformer in Maya.”

The modeling and animation were done on Maya 6, with textures and mattes painted with Adobe Photoshop CS in 8 and 16 bits — Christine Leclerc was the texture lead. Most of the camera tracking was done with 3D-Equalizer. For the rendering, Meteor Studios used RenderMan, and created the RIBs with MTOR in Maya. “For the key shot in which all the carts “pile up”, we used rigid body dynamics to get the crash looking right,” says Aaron Dem, vp of production at Meteor Studios. “Once we had approved animation, we animated one of the CG double to fall out of the tumbling car. We then added lots of extra elements to the shot to add to the believability. Lastly, and always, our compositors put the finishing touches to make sure everything integrated perfectly.”