Hi Alan
Awesome work. Just want to let you know that breakdowns like
this are not only important for other professionals who have
this massive shared curiosity but it also incredibly important
when it comes to our students. When we made the decision to move
away from Maya to Softimage for our teaching we caught quite a
bit of flak for the decision. However posts like these are
really great because we can show just how Softimage is being
used. We have also just set up our first Arnold render farm and
we are very excited to see the results we get from two really
great pieces of software.
Kind regards
Angus
From: Alan Fregtman <alan.fregt...@gmail.com
<mailto:alan.fregt...@gmail.com>>
Reply-To: "softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
<mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com>"
<softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
<mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com>>
Date: Monday 15 July 2013 9:07 PM
To: XSI Mailing List <softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
<mailto:softimage@listproc.autodesk.com>>
Subject: OT: Pacific Rim
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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