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MillimeterHoly Textures
Jun 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
For filmmakers, one problem resulting from the con- troversies surrounding The Da Vinci Code involved being shut out of certain locations central to the story. The St. Sulpice Cathedral in Paris is a prime example. A key 4 p.m. scene takes place inside the Cathedral, but the production wasn't permitted to film there.
Therefore, filmmakers brought the job of realistically visualizing the church's interior to Rainmaker Digital of Vancouver, British Columbia, which opened a new London office for the project. Rainmaker sold director Ron Howard and visual effects supervisor Angus Bickerton on using projection geometry techniques, relying on textures from thousands of still photos taken inside the real St. Sulpice. Last year, Rainmaker used the same approach in the film Firewall, but this time, the company extended the approach significantly.
“We worked with Angus on Firewall and used the technique there,” recalls Warren Franklin, Rainmaker's president. “We did some tests for him that convinced him the approach would work for St. Sulpice. We basically took textures from the real church and put them into our CG model, combining that with greenscreen plates in which only the floor, a few chairs, posts, and the altar were real.”
Artists took more than 4,000 photos at St. Sulpice using Canon EOS-1Ds 16-megapixel still cameras. They cleaned and stitched the images together in Adobe Photoshop, and imported them into NewTek LightWave, where their basic geometry was incorporated into 3D models of the church's interior. Camera moves were rendered out and handed over to the Rainmaker compositing team, which used Eyeon's Digital Fusion software to combine elements.
“This approach immensely helped our 3D department's render times,” says Mathew Krentz, lead compositor on the sequence. “We added moon beams, outside lighting, and shadows, but we saved time because we had photoreal textures ready to go into 3D space. Without this technique, we would have had to specifically create all details of the church in 3D, and then properly texture those elements ourselves. That can normally take months of R&D time.”
