With the vfx-intensive movies this summer, a diverse arsenal of tools are being used in fresh and challenging ways to get the job done.

Summer is here and obviously so are the vfx-intensive movies, which rely heavily on a diverse arsenal of tools to get the job done. There are some new developments, such as Luxology's modo now being used at Pixar, which helped power up WALL•E and the Axiom. Massive is becoming more and more ubiquitous, of course, as are Fusion and Nuke on the compositing side. But here is just a glimpse of how a few of these tools are being utilized in fresh and challenging ways.

Speed Racer and Global Illumination
Speed Racer may have gone down in flames at the box office, but it arguably remains the boldest experiment of the season. Haarm-Pieter (HP) Duiker, Digital Domain's CG supervisor on the project, talked about the software used to create the "hyper realism" effect for the cars and the racing environments. Digital Domain used about 50 lighters and about 50 compositors during Speed Racer. In all, about 200 people worked on the making of the next-gen feature by the Wachowskis. Maya and Houdini were the two main packages used. Compositing was done in Nuke (which DD turned over to The Foundry). But the star of the software lineup was, of course, mental ray from mental images (now owned by NVIDIA).

Some of the data used to start the Speed Racer project included parking a Corvette in a parking lot and shooting the car and gray balls from multiple angles to thoroughly capture the lighting conditions. After taking raw data from the parking lot to the studio, Duiker's team began to draw on some of the lighting and rendering techniques and global illumination used in The Matrix sequels. With advanced photogrammetry and commercial tools, the data was used with mental ray to begin the lighting of the car models.

A real challenge for Speed Racer was to combine the reflections and diffuse sides of the cars in a way to make it believable. Along with this was the added challenge of working with football stadium-sized sets for the races to take place and integrating more than 100 cars.

Duiker said mental ray was the renderer of choice because it had a very open API. The artist can build their own libraries. "Digital Domain built an entire suite of shaders from the ground up to what we consider to be the most advanced global illuminating tools today."

One goal for Speed Racer was to take the realism and cars to a hyper-realism. Ray tracing was used for secondary illumination and diffusion. This process combined with pushing the colors to a hyper-realism visual effect is what made Speed Racer a truly unique work of art.

FrameCycler Goes on a Stereoscopic Journey In 2003, Iridas was approached by several movie studios for a stereoscopic version of its renowned FrameCycler. In 2007, the stereo features became a standard part of the software with an unlock code for those who wanted to buy the feature. Without a stereo review, you would have to watch your sequence with the left eye, then the right eye and try to match everything up. Is the parallax right for the object being in front of the bush or does it look like the object is behind the bush? Stereographic FrameCycler identifies these issues right away.

Color grade is also important for near and distant objects. The Dolby projection system can color grade and FrameCycler works with Dolby. So those minute right eye / left eye changes that we take for granted in the real world can be done easily in FrameCycler.

Jump to Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D (opening July 11 from New Line). It is one of the summer movies that relied heavily on FrameCycler where there were mixes of 3-D and composite image.

Vfx work for Journey to the Center of the Earth was done in Montreal facilities, all of whom used FrameCycler with DualStream for artist review and digital dailies.