Cheers Alan! Always great to show how Softimage+Arnold IS a winning solution. There is a lot more studios than we wanna admit that uses one package of another just because this is made with that. Seeing "our" combo in great movies maybe will show them who is the really boss :) Cheers and always enjoyed your work :) All the best and wish you a lot more projects like this, to you and your team. If you need someone to peek behind your shoulder and make one damn good coffee that raise dead, just call, I'll take even that :)))
On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 9:07 PM, Alan Fregtman <[email protected]>wrote: > Hey guys, > > A lot of people say Softimage doesn't get used much in movies, so I > personally love to hear stories when it does happen. Therefore, I wanted to > share some details with you. :) > > I'm the lead rigger at *Rodeo FX* http://rodeofx.com and we did all of > the interiors of the control pods (the cockpits, that is), including the > visors, foot actuators & mechanical stilts, some digidoubles, etc. > (except the holograms/UI graphics that were done by the folks at Hybride.) > We also had the chance of doing our first organic creature, the brain in > the lab (which involved a lot of "gross" ICE deformations), as well as many > beautiful matte paintings and a couple of helicopters. > > Overall, we did over a hundred shots. CG was done in Softimage and as far > as I know it was all rendered in our favourite renderer, Arnold! We'd still > be rendering today if Mentalray had been used. :p We threw countless ~8k > textures with displacement and stupid amounts of topology, and good ol' > Arnie performed like a champ. > > The stilts (the leg controls in the cockpit) had anything from 1500 to > 2500 separate meshes and on average about 150 segments (solid groups of > parts that moved as one.) Once we identified the "segments" by the end we > had a rig of Arnold stand-ins with each segment saved as one ass file, and > low-res geo representing that segment constrained to some part of the rig. > It then became relatively "light" to have the standins rigged instead of > the full raw geo, and it made it quite easy to replace parts or textures > later in the pipeline during or after animation. (Also caching was a piece > of cake in this scenario, as we only needed to plot the segment nulls > instead of thousands of meshes or pointcaching anything.) > > On the brain there was procedural pulsing animation driven by ICE > deformers. Globules would "breathe", a heart-like organ would pump its > ventricles intermittently and an intestine-like organ flowed with bulges > travelling along its tract. It was gross and (in my opinion) kind of > awesome. lol Speaking of ICE, there was a kind of lettuce behind the brain > that was also moving a bit. The modeling was done with strips that were > procedurally curled and then if I remember correctly the whole thing was > driven via Syflex as the brain gently floated. This lettuce thing was > handled by another guy on this mailing list, my coworker and friend > Jonathan Laborde. Maybe if he's reading this he can give more details of > how he used ICE in a few other shots. > > It was crazy fun project to work on. Fingers crossed that Pacific Rim 2 > becomes a reality. :) Anyway, did you guys go see it? What'd you think? > > Oh and speaking of other movies, we did a ton of work in "Now You See Me" > as well, including hundreds of stadium dudes with our propietary ICE static > crowd system, falling/flying money, cg bubbles, an art-directed liquid, > lockpicking, flying cards, many vehicles, the projected motiongraphics near > the end and a few invisible fx. (I feel like I probably missed something, > but anyway, we did a lot.) We were the main vfx vendor on that film, > delivering just over 20 minutes worth of vfx "magic" (pun intended.) Again, > Soft & Arnold and lots of effects in ICE all throughout. > > Cheers, > > -- Alan > >
