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MillimeterG.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra Step by Step
Aug 26, 2009 4:40 PM, By Ellen Wolff
A revealing scene in Paramount Pictures’ G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra takes audiences on a descent into a vast, underground hangar that’s buried beneath desert sands. It’s filled with rows of sleek, shark-like Howler aircraft, and hundreds of people are working to keep this facility humming. But with the exception of a handful of actors, most of this world was crafted in the computers at CIS Hollywood. Director Stephen Sommers approved a drawing outlining what he’d like to see, and Visual Effects Supervisor Boyd Shermis then challenged CIS to make this virtual world feel real.
“If you were to say, ‘No one would possibly want anything to be that big,’ you’re probably undershooting it by 50 percent,” says Bryan Hirota, who supervised the vfx team at CIS. We first see this secret place, Hirota explains, “when an iris in the sand opens up and a Howler descends through it and lands. This gigantic hangar is a mile-and-a-half long and three-quarters of a mile wide. As the Howler descends and comes in for a landing, the camera swoops all around it. After it lands, the Howler’s door opens and people get out, and as they walk, the camera pans around and we watch them enter an elevator. The camera is moving the whole time, and it’s a really long shot—about 900 frames. Any time a shot gets longer, its complexity goes up exponentially.”
Along with the approved production drawing, CIS received some essential elements needed to complete this shot: bluescreen footage of the actors climbing out of a partial set-piece of a Howler aircraft; a CG Howler (modeled and textured in Autodesk Maya by the Venice, Calif., studio Digital Domain); and clips of actors performing miscellaneous tasks against bluescreen, which CIS could use to populate the scene.
“The first thing we did was to build a rough Maya model based on the production artwork that the director liked,” Hirota says. CIS worked with San Francisco-based Digitrove to model the extensive 3D CG space. “Once we had the generic layout of the main Howler and of the space, then we began a layout phase to determine where all the other Howlers would go and where will we wanted to put vehicles or troops or mechanics,” Hirota says. “We kept modifying things until we had a layout and a previz of a camera move that everybody liked. We had to create one seamless shot.”
“To make any space feel immense you have to cram it full of stuff,” Hirota says. “There’s row after row of Howlers, each with individual actions going on, and then there are lift platforms with individual actions going on in those. We had to put in enormous numbers of people, vehicles and props just to help the scale hold up. Boyd Shermis had the foresight to shoot some generic blue screen footage of people doing various tasks.”
“In order to bring the environment to life we added things like mist and arcing sparks from people welding machinery,” Hirota says. “CIS had an inhouse library of photographed elements like mist and sparks that we could use, and we also did some fluid simulations of mist to get the interactivity with the Howler as it lands. We used a 3DsMax plug-in called Fume FX for that.”
Simulation also played a key role in populating the hangar’s immense space with background people and vehicles. “Once we had a general understanding of the layout, Dan Warom started doing crowd simulations in Massive to see if the actions of the background people looked interesting,” Hirota says. “Hundreds, if not thousands, of people and vehicles were created in Massive simulations so that they would be aware of each other.”
To tie the CG Howler aircraft into this busy scene, CIS used Pixar RenderMan for raytracing reflections of the bustling environment onto the aircrafts’ metallic surfaces. “We had to do all kinds of ray tracing to get those reflections on the Howlers. Without that, the shot wouldn’t sell,” Hirota says, whose experience with raytracing techniques dates back a decade to his breakthrough work with VIFX on the air-traffic drama Pushing Tin.
All of these elements were then integrated in Apple Shake by CIS compositor Randy Brown. “Once we had the CG people laid out—and we knew where the foreground actors were, our compositor then did layouts of the people shot by Boyd Shermis&3151;which were put on cards to fill up the space.”
This hangar shot was one of the most challenging of the 20 minutes of footage that CIS worked on for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. “And it was done at 4K,” Hirota says. “Once you get a complicated shot to the level of detail where it needs to be, those details fade into the background. The funny thing about putting in all these elements is that on first glance they might not catch your eye. But if you could watch the shot without them, it would be really apparent if that stuff wasn’t there!”
Credit Roll
Director: Stephen Sommers
DP: Mitchell Amundsen
Visual Effects Supervisor: Boyd Shermis
For CIS Hollywood:
Visual Effects Supervisor: Bryan Hirota
2D Supervisor: Patrick Kavanaugh
Animator: Gary Abrahamian
Lighting/Look Development: Diana Miao
Compositor: Randy Brown
Crowd Simulation: Dan Warom
Howler Design, M-odeling, and Texturing: Digital Domain
Virtual Set Modeling: Digitrove
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