The Ruins features an atypical movie monster, and Rising Sun Pictures developed regular looking leaves and vines into a menacing, amorphous character. All images © DreamWorks SKG 2008. Courtesy of RSP.

The Ruins (opening April 4 from DreamWorks) follows five vacationing friends who uncover Mayan ruins that are entangled with nasty man-eating vines. Obviously, the very nature of the film's creature constituted a major challenge for first-time director Carter Smith and Visual Effects Supervisor Greg McMurry. This was not your typical movie monster: no eyes, no teeth, no mouth… Just a bunch of regular looking leaves. Yet, the team had to find a way to make them look scary and deadly.

This task was awarded to Australia-based Rising Sun Pictures, which created 110 shots for the movie. The team included VFX Supervisor Ken McGaugh, VFX Producer Mel Jones and Production Manager Caroline Grubb. Using conceptual sketches provided by Rising Sun Pictures and Tatopoulos Studios, and onset props as a reference, RSP had to elaborate a look and feel for the vines, as well as developing an animation style that would evolve as the story progressed. "Creatively, it is always a challenge to create an amorphous character that is structurally different in every shot of the film," says CG Supervisor Malcolm Humphreys. "We had to go through a long phase of performance development to try to understand the director's vision about how the vines needed to read on screen. Our animation had to continually be tone down, as the animators always wanted to deliver a big performance…"

RSP used Maya for the hero vine animation and lighting, while Houdini was employed for vine mass and dynamics. Rendering was carried out with 3Delight through Maya, and Shake was the tool of choice for compositing.

Playing with Lego…
During pre-production, the team realized that Smith and McMurry wanted to have control of each vine configuration. Onset, the practical vines could be pulled apart and put back together in all different ways. A similar "Lego-like" system was employed for the digital version. "The 'Lego' system allowed us to add, change type, move and delete appendages along the length of the vine," Humphreys explains. "We had four main different types of appendages on the vine (leafs, flowers, buds and tendrils) with their own selection of variations. With all of the different types and variations, we ended up with 540 possible combinations for the vine character."

This amount of data became a large management task for the artists, and the team had to build a workflow to help manage this complexity. Each appendage on the vine also needed to bounce, sway and collide in a believable way, but still be under the control of the animator, who had to hit the director's key performance points.

"We came up with a system called 'Anim Layers' that encapsulated an animation rig that we called 'modules'," Humphreys notes. "We developed modules for different animation purposes like performance, secondary motion and collisions. The modules could be snapped together into a chain to produce a layered animation rig. We ended up with so many appendages in the Maya scenes that we created different bind modules that allowed artists to selectively choose a different geometry detail for each appendage depending on what they needed. This helped animators and effects artists remove/add some of the geometry complexity in Maya for different tasks.

"There was a 'blind data' module that allowed us to remove all the appendages from a scene while still maintaining the animation data inside these modules. It enabled us to swap appendage variations in a scene and recover the previous performance. This happened a lot during the production when Carter and Greg wanted to change the configuration of the vine during animation."