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 <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
Reply-To: "[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>"
<[email protected]
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Date: Monday 15 July 2013 9:07 PM
To: XSI Mailing List <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>
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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