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MillimeterDr. Manhattan Project
Feb 25, 2009 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Tech secrets from Watchmen.
The comic-book Dr. Manhattan has white eyes and no eyelashes or eyebrow hairs, but Snyder decided to also give him these attributes after Imageworks demonstrated to his satisfaction that it could be done. His eyes were given bright-white pupils compared to the rest of the eye to create a sense of eye direction, and those were also used as a light source to help illuminate surrounding skin.
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Imageworks eventually went further and added a fine coat of peach-fuzz hair to Dr. Manhattan's skin like real people have. “[This was] the kitchen-sink mentality,” Travers says. “We wanted to throw everything on him that could make him realistic, especially where skin and hair were concerned.
“After our tests, we decided we wanted subtle hair. Every shot, [Dr. Manhattan's] peach fuzz was part of the rendering process. Humans, in bright rim light, have that hair on the edge of the skin that lights up when photographed. All the time, people work on realistic skin shaders that ignore the hair on the skin. We thought it was essential, so we added it. I'd have to say the best work we did on the character are the close-up shots of his face.”
Imageworks also used compression maps for skin animation — a technique designed to illustrate tension and compression on one part of the skin compared to another. “When the skin compresses, like when lips purse, the skin becomes bumpier,” Travers says. “When tension is created, wrinkles would lessen. If you straighten your fingers, you notice the skin on the knuckles bulges up. That has to do with tension of the skin. Every shot we built, we had compression maps — bump maps that activate every time he compresses his skin.”
DI help
All sorts of other effects complete the Dr. Manhattan look — including a CG internal body mass of fluids and pinpoint light that move in concert with his body to give the impression that the character is, in a sense, a window on the entire universe. A final key ingredient in completing his look, though, was the digital-intermediate process at Company 3, Santa Monica, Calif. Snyder and Fong did the DI with Snyder's longtime collaborator and head of Company 3, colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld, whom Snyder calls “a major resource in how [they] approached the look.”
Fong and Des Jardin both say the DI was particularly helpful in smoothing out the blue glow and making it consistent.
“We always had an eye toward the DI [while shooting], making sure those shots were as neutral as possible,” Des Jardin says. “That gave us the flexibility to have Stefan push it in any direction we wanted. Once you put that definitive blue glow into the images, you establish a look or color ratio or luminance ratio that would be difficult to alter in the DI. So before we shot those scenes, we got a set of test shots into Stefan, and he and Zack and Larry played with them ahead of time, so we would know if we were in any trouble for color-correcting or not color-correcting the blue in the DI. In those tests, we found that blue is such a specific frequency that it gets into areas that you don't imagine. It gets into shadow areas and makes it look strange. So it helps to have a DP and director who have a specific idea of what they want to do visual-effects-wise in a scene. We had the LEDs, but no one had tried this before, we were always guessing on set. We had a dimmer to increase or decrease intensity, but until the camera tests, we didn't know what the response would be. It took probably a quarter of the way through the Manhattan shots before we had a handle on it. I worked with Larry to meter [the light], of course, and pick a luminance value, but to [Snyder's] credit, he accepted all of that at face value. The crazy falloff in the color was reflected in our composites. But when we took those shots into the DI, Stefan was able to isolate and control the values nicely.”
Still, Fong says the project's lengthy testing phase allowed filmmakers to shoot and light the Dr. Manhattan sequences strategically. “[That way, Sonnenfeld's work would] not be to save the movie, but rather, to be the frosting on the cake. Like anything else — if you give him something good to start, he'll be able to make things even more interesting in the DI. Stefan helped immeasurably in keeping the look of Dr. Manhattan consistent, and also making it seem like the blue interactive glow was actually being cast from the element itself.” As complex as the effects work was, Watchmen is hardly the same kind of digitally constructed movie as Snyder's last extravaganza — the entirely greenscreen-produced 300. In fact, he says he considers Watchmen more of a “normal” movie where he could focus much of his personal efforts on performance.
“I've done lots of visual-effects-based projects — commercials and 300 especially — and the big lesson for me was just being able to know how to work with the technology so it is not a hindrance, but rather something that can make the whole thing better,” Snyder says. “This time, instead of worrying about scary CGI or set extensions, I considered all that a tool and focused on performance. But it is fun as a filmmaker watching the movie evolve as we put these pieces together.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
