Speed Racer may have gone down in flames at the box office, but it arguably remains the boldest experiment of the season. Courtesy of Warner Bros. 

Meteor Studios, which closed down earlier this year, ran Iridas' review application on Linux machines."All of our artists used FrameCycler Professional for stereo review," says Francis Provencher, who is now technology supervisor at a new studio, LumiereFX in Montreal. "Our compositors and trackers used it with stereo goggles. Trackers 'placed the cameras' and tracked camera movement so that the CG content was properly positioned in the shots."

"Doing CGI in stereo is easy, but when you add the plates, it gets tricky," added Marc Rousseau, vfx supervisor at Mokko Studio, which runs FrameCycler on Windows. "It is a complicated process making the plates match. Our compositors couldn't use the same 'cheats that they have with single stream content. It's like they had to re-learn how to composite.

"Obviously, we couldn't have done this without DualStream. It works great, you load the right eye in FrameCycler and the left eye follows automatically. FrameCycler with DualStream is a powerful tool and we found we could catch 90% of stereo issues right there on the small screen."

R&H excels at destruction vfx, and their work on The Incredible Hulk was no different. ™ & © 2008 Marvel Ent. Courtesy of Rhythm & Hues. 

Rhythm & Hues and Sonic Cannons
Nathan Ortiz is one of the vfx supervisors at Rhythm & Hues that worked on Universal's The Incredible Hulk and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (opening Aug. 1). Houdini along with in-house plug-ins are the big tools for those movies. Ahab is a proprietary plug-in that does fluid simulations and Cloud Tank is the proprietary volumetric renderer. Felt is a custom volumetric modeling tool.

With this arsenal, R&H went about doing what they like to do -- destruction. Scenes such as tearing the police car in half and using the halves for gloves or blowing up tanks are the kind of visual effects R&H excels at.

Ortiz and co. used a lot of aspects of Houdini and especially the DOPS, Dynamic Operators (or rigid body dynamics), to create the scene where the Hulk is pinned by the sonic cannon. The goal of the sonic cannon was create the effect of an invisible force that could blow things up and also pin the Hulk to the ground. The hope was to make the scene so realistic as to not be able to tell the difference between the real world and the CG world.