Alan, I saw Pacific Rim in Imax 3D and was absolutely blown away! In my
opinion, it's the film that is best suited for Imax 3D projection. Other
films may be fun to watch like that, but Pacific Rim really steps it up.
Major ass was kicked in the making of this film.
Congrats to you Alan, and everyone else at Rodeo! Impressive stuff, and
glad to know Soft was used!
I don't really understand the naysayers complaining of thin plots. Who
would possibly be naive enough to go see this film for any other reason
than to satisfy the 10-yr old kid in you? It's all over the previews!
Don't fool yourself... you know why you're there! :-D
-Tim
On 7/15/2013 2:41 PM, David Gallagher wrote:
Congratulations!
On 7/15/2013 3:07 PM, Alan Fregtman 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
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