The Wookiees prepare for their own D-Day invasion.

“If you looked at George’s original animatics, he essentially has the shot, but I’ve got to figure out that this foreground explosion has to be this big, this aircraft has to fly down over here and is just going to miss this thing over here and divert over there and at the end of the shot this aircraft comes in and starts firing. It’s similar to a live-action shoot. You’d rehearse it and shoot it and then tweak it. It took six weeks to pull off huge matte paintings, CG water, photographed individual elements, digital and real smoke created on stage. Why, the Wookiees alone took 1,000 gigabytes of storage.”

As for the matte department, it pushed digital environments to new heights at ILM. Not only were artists on staff retrained but also others were recruited from colleges in California, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, London and New Zealand, and via the Internet in Canada, Japan, Sweden, Africa and Australia. The matte artists used Max, Maya, XSI and Cinema 4D and composited 2D elements into 3D using After Effects, Shake and their own proprietary tool.

“We were robust and capable of delivering whatever George came up,” Harb offers. He delivered a concept and a look for a world along with an animatic. A good example of that was the outside of the Opera House. This is one of those environments where all we had was a camera move in the computer, so we came up with pretty detailed 3D models, textures, traffic signs and people. Also, inside the Opera House is nearly entirely virtual too.”

Meanwhile, the digital establishing shots are stunning. “Utapau establishing shots start out as simple geometry with these wavy shapes,” Harb points out. “There was also a big practical model built of the sinkhole. [The artist] went over to the model shop, took some digital stills and that afternoon had the sinkhole integrated.

The establishing shots of the fiery world of Mustafar.

“The Mustafar establishing shots ran for months. The look of this place everyone finessed a lot. One artist completed one shot with all of these little animated elements: Every single splash, every single little puff of smoke. He then placed it onto a card and manipulated it to coincide with whatever else was happening at different paces: the waterfalls, the topography, the erupting volcanoes and their moving smoke, the complex itself. ”

With Mustafar, they sometimes used the principle of height fields: “From above, the tops of the peaks are bright white and the plains are black and everything in between is gray. The artist goes through and sculpts this entire environment and what’s neat about this environment is that there’s a lot of computer graphics. You’re going to build this rock model in a traditional CG approach, put pictures on this model, turn the light on in the computer and then render several passes. And it will then be composited with other elements shot somewhere else.

“Another more direct approach is don’t even turn the light on in the computer. Just paint the lava or waterfalls, project it from the point of view of the camera and stick it to geometry and then render it all together. What’s great about global illumination is that we don’t use it in a typical way in the matte department. What we want to know from global illumination is what is the quality of the light in a building? What is the quality of the highlight like? What is the quality of that transition across its face like? But we don’t want to render it for every frame because it’s very processing intensive. We’ll render one frame that is representative of what we want.

For digital matte artist Yanick Dusseault, his challenge was to not only create more beautiful paintings but also to create the same environments in different ways. “I just try to understand what makes an image so interesting and reproduce it, copying what had been done before in terms of architecture and landscape. Naboo is a good example. You play with light differently. Making it backlit changes the mood, makes it more dramatic, more beautiful, which is important when you have so many different planets and environments flying by you so quickly.”