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MillimeterStep by Step:
Stargate: Atlantis
Feb 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
Styling a Storm
Rainmaker has long been a visual effects provider for the Stargate SG-1 television franchise — work that has earned several Emmy nominations for the Vancouver-based studio. So it was natural that Rainmaker was tapped to create the visual effects for the Sci Fi Channel series Stargate: Atlantis.
“It's set in a totally different galaxy,” says Rainmaker Digital effects supervisor Bruce Woloshyn about the water-based city of Atlantis. “Unlike Stargate SG1, where we could always use stock footage of Cheyenne Mountain, with Stargate: Atlantis, our main location doesn't exist.”
The challenges this presented were especially evident in the pivotal episode called “The Eye,” in which Atlantis is threatened by a massive hurricane. Rainmaker's task was to create a sense of peril using a range of atmospheric effects, including lighting strikes and wind-driven rain coming off huge waves that bear down on the skyscraper-filled city. One shot in particular captures the awesome power of the hurricane by having the camera tilt up as one particularly huge wave approaches.
“If there was a real camera guy there,” says Woloshyn, “he would be running!”
Rainmaker created a 3D-CG model of Atlantis using New Tek's Lightwave running on Windows-based Boxx workstations. “It was the largest computer-generated model — with more than four million polygons — that we had ever manufactured. You can back up and see the whole thing, or you can drive up to a window of an individual building. We've optimized the model down to a little more than two million polys and about a gig of textures, but it's still a huge, heavy model for a television show.”
Rainmaker used Lightwave to previsualize camera moves and framing for approval. “We used a dumbed-down version of the city,” Woloshyn explains. “It's only a few thousand polys so we could move around it fairly quickly.”
Creating the hurricane-driven waves was also done primarily in Lightwave. “Basic deformation tools come with Lightwave,” says Woloshyn. “We had a deformation on a flat surface that we could push and pull around so we could scale the wave up or down. We've got the textures and the depth of foam inside the wave moving parallel to one another at appropriate speeds to give a bigger sense of scale.”
The rippling surface of the water was done in Lightwave, but for whitewater splashes and particles of mist and rain Woloshyn chose Alias Maya. “Maya comes with fluid dynamics, so we built a pipeline to get stuff back and forth between Lightwave and Maya. That allowed us to maintain the camera and be pixel-accurate.”
Woloshyn needed to make sure that Maya-generated water effects crashed against the Lightwave-generated cityscape in believable ways. “We transposed an accurate, but dumbed-down version of our Lightwave city model into Maya so that we would have a city version in both packages. My hard-surface modelers are Lightwave guys and my best particle guys are Maya guys, so we had different artists on different packages. We had to find a way that we could use both packages and still be efficient.”
These various CG elements were rendered separately in Lightwave to afford Rainmaker's compositors with the greatest amount of flexibility. “We rendered a lot of passes,” says Woloshyn, who was a compositor before becoming a supervisor. “We rendered a complete 3D environment separately and then used that for a reflection map. What we did for the lighting was also a multi-pass render. We rendered the color version of the city and then the color version of the wave as separate passes. Then we rendered the specular highlights on a black box version of the city. For atmospherics we rendered a z-depth fog. We used Spider, which is a Lightwave multi-thread render controller for our renderfarm. To make sure it didn't look too CG, we rendered everything at double rez and then squashed it. Making it double rez requires more setup time, but it's only a function of your renderfarm, and we have a big PC-based farm.”
Compositing was handled in both Digital Fusion running on Boxx workstations and Discreet Logic Inferno running on SGI machines. “Just the wave — without the particles — had 16 layers,” says Woloshyn. “We pre-composited our water surfaces in Fusion to avoid moving so many layers from our main SAN storage onto our Discreet Logic hard drives. The frame storage where the actual images are stored for all our Infernos is separate for each machine. And we have huge ones — every box has a terabyte of storage. But you still have to move all that stuff around.”
The final composites were done in Inferno, and then Woloshyn used Inferno to do the final color timing himself.
“I brought everybody's finished comps and the elements that I needed and timed everything to match,” he says. “I didn't re-comp — it was just me not wanting to let go!”
Stargate: Atlantis presented Rainmaker with one other challenge: The show was shot and finished in high-def instead of film. “Most of our effects were done in standard definition and up-rezzed, although we build from high-def stuff. I've got a really amazing up-rez machine called a Teranex [from Silicon Optix]. Because of the complexity and sheer volume of the effects, there isn't enough rendering horsepower to do this show this fast if we had to do everything in full HD.”
“The public is used to seeing stuff that looks so amazing,” says Woloshyn. “I find that the challenge of working for television is conveying a sense of scale. When you're trying to show something very large, like the wave in this shot, the first thing against you is screen size. Even a 50in. big screen isn't very big. So we overemphasized. We used all our tricks to the nth degree!”
| Director - | Martin Wood |
| Executive Producers - | Brad Wright, Robert C. Cooper |
| For Rainmaker Digital: | |
| Visual Effects Producer - | Michelle Comens |
| Visual Effects Supervisor - | Mark Breakspear |
| Digital Effects Supervisor - | Bruce G. Woloshyn |
| Visual Effects Co-ordinator - | Tara Conley |
| Lead 3D Animator/Digital Compositing - | Dan Mayer |
| Lead Water Development Artist - | Jose Burgos |
| Motion Choreography / Effects Lighting - | Tristam Gieni |
| Digital Color Grading - | Bruce G. Woloshyn |
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
