Summer 2008: Tools That Push Visual Limits
To make a scene look real, the team started with real world physics. Calculations were made to determine how much force it would take to move the nine-foot-tall Hulk and pin him. This same force turned out to be enough to cause clothing to tear and even skin to deform and tear. Marvel Comics, of course, wants the Hulk to be stronger than that, so adjustments were made to make the Hulk able to withstand that kind of real world physics.
Houdini did not need any real tweaking. Its particle system was sufficient to make the effect of the sonic force look like an invisible and dangerous weapon. A custom operator node in Houdini was used for the timing of the collisions to make the sonic cannon very accurate on impact. VEX operators (Vector Expression) were used. When the impact occurred a number of events had to simultaneously occur as well. The clothing had to tear, dirt and dust blasted around, grass movements occurred, paint flecks flew and all the detail that goes with an explosion /impact had to work at precisely the right time. One of the team members said that the sonic cannon "looks like being hit with a thousand leaf blowers."
Marvel was very conscious about how much of the movie was real world and how much was Hulk's world, meaning that the laws of physics were different in Hulk's world. This explained why the force of the sonic canon did not vaporize his skin and still gave the illusion of a strong impact.
The majority of Hulk was rendered in the proprietary Wren renderers. The sonic cannon was a combination of Wren and CloudTank. Some of the Mantra renderer was used as well. ZBrush and Mudbox also found their way into the movie.
Wren has proprietary subsurface skin textures and shaders. R&H has done a lot of development in that area.
Now that Ortiz and his team are confident that they can destroy vehicles realistically, the next horizon is to scale it up and keep pushing the amount of pyrotechnics and levels of destruction.
Summer Fun for Autodesk Sylwan pointed out that Speed Racer has continued a stylistic trend in next-gen movies that we are likely to see more of in the future: a "hyper-reality" that pushes visual limits rather than big explosions and other CG mayhem.
Meanwhile, Star Wars:The Clone Wars is relying heavily on an Autodesk pipeline to blast off into fresh animated territory. The 3D-animated series from Lucasfilm Animation launches as a feature on Aug. 15 from Warner Bros. before debuting in the fall as a series on Cartoon Network.
Not surprisingly, Clone Wars is all Maya, plus some other Autodesk tools have been utilized as part of the robust studio pipeline.
In conclusion, the tools for the 2008 summer season are advancing rapidly in their ability to create realistic and lifelike vfx, promising new realities and hyper-realities in the world of cinema.
Eric Post is an attorney, journalist, computer graphic artist, helicopter pilot/mechanic and a former pastor. Although he is a traditional artist, he enjoys modeling and landscape scenes in CG and uses various applications for medical illustrations at his office. From 2004-2006, Post was senior technical editor for the Renderosity magazine and e-zine. From 2006-2007, Post served as a staff writer for the Renderosity Front Page News, as well as having edited for various Renderosity publications.
What is a summer without Autodesk and what is a movie without Maya? Sebastian Sylwan, Autodesk Media & Ent. senior industry manager-film, provided a company rundown of summer.
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