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MillimeterMac Effects
Jun 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
The Cave, which premieres in August, is a horror film chock full of creature-oriented visual effects (250 shots), but the workflow was anything but typical. Luma Pictures, Santa Monica, Calif., was the primary effects' vendor on the film — the company's first effort as lead effects vendor on a big feature since it switched to an all-Macintosh OS X pipeline.
The Cave’s creatures, and the rest of the film’s effects, were built at Luma using an all-OS X pipeline.
Payam Shohadai, Luma's visual effects supervisor on the film, says Luma picked OS X over Linux when the company made the decision to defect from the PC ranks.
“These days, the main OS alternative [to PC-based operating systems] for visual effects is Linux, which we considered,” he says. “But we didn't think Linux was quite as artist-friendly as the Macintosh system for visual effects, so we made this decision, and it has worked out great.”
Artaya Boonsoong, technical supervisor at Luma, says the platform's attributes are well suited enough to the way visual effects artists work to offset common concerns about the limited number of graphics acceleration cards available in the Mac world — a key consideration for rendering.
“It's convenient to write applications and scripts on OS X, due to its Unix underpinnings, coupled with a robust graphic user interface,” Boonsoong explains. “[These capabilities] have let us create tools to manage our file referencing system, render submissions, and [perform] post-render image file processing, such as some types of motion blur. On top of that, we've developed a graphic user interface [called the Luma Element Portal] to wrap around all aspects of our pipeline, letting us represent it all as a simple interface for our artists.”
Luma used approximately 60 G5 workstations and 60 XServe render nodes on The Cave, relying on Maya for all 3D work, Shake and Combustion for compositing, and Mental Ray for rendering.
(For a detailed look at the The Cave's production challenges, check out the following link — millimeter.com/e-newsletters/hd_focus_052405/index.html.)
