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MillimeterStep By Step: Quantum of Solace
Nov 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
Working in parallel was a 3D team that built high-resolution digital doubles that could be tracked onto selected shots as needed. “Because we had the action captured from all those different angles, we could track digi doubles' faces on top of this footage in a pretty straightforward way,” Wuttke says. “We used a mixed bag of [The Pixel Farm] PF Track, [2d3] boujou, [Science.D.Visions] 3D Equalizer, and an inhouse tool that uses distance constraints. We can do 2D tracking within [Apple] Shake and export those 2D tracks into a bit of software, which turns it into a 3D matchmove. We used a mixed bag.”
The strong winds in the wind tunnel distorted the actual faces, which had to be matched in the digital doubles that were animated in Autodesk Maya. “We wrote skin deformation tools to send ripples across their skin, to match synthetically what we were seeing in the footage. These digi doubles were complete with hair and cloth simulations for their clothes. So the net result was that we had the flexibility to mix bits of real footage with CG,” Wuttke says.
Lighting was extremely challenging, however, since the sequence begins in a sunlit sky and ends inside a dark sinkhole — and the faces had to be seen full-frame. DNeg used Pixar RenderMan to get subsurface scattering effects of light on the skin of the digital doubles. “Because we had captured the motion so effectively, we could just track our digi doubles on top of the photography, relight them, and put maps from the digi doubles back onto the photography,” Wuttke says. “It was a hybrid solution.”
All of this happens against backgrounds that were combinations of synthetic elements. “The environment was entirely CG — including the plane, clouds, and smoke,” Wade says. “We also see the desert and the sinkhole that they're falling into. All of those environments had to be modeled, textured, and lit.”
The mix includes a matte-painted sinkhole created with Adobe Photoshop and desert panoramas stitched together from digital stills. “It was a huge environmental effort because no plates were shot,” Wuttke says. “There's a lot of tiled photography. We have a tool called Stig that essentially takes bracketed photos and stitches them together in ultra-high resolution, like a cyclorama. We also projected some photography onto 3D sky domes for moments when we needed parallax inside the image.”
All of these elements were composited in DNeg's version of Shake, according to Wade. “We modified a 64-bit version of Shake inhouse, and we did all our compositing with that,” he says.
To manufacture such a key sequence for Quantum of Solace, DNeg had to combine real and synthetic elements to an unprecedented degree. “It's very satisfying to do something that hasn't been done before and do it well,” Wuttke says.
CREDIT ROLL
Director: Marc Forster
Visual Effects Supervisor: Kevin Tod Haug
For Double Negative:
Visual Effects Supervisors: Alex Wuttke, Ged Wright
2D Supervisor: Victor Wade
3D Matchmove Supervisor: Joel Prager
Sequence Lead: Brian Kranz
Lead Animator: Chris Sweet
CG Artists: Theo Facey, Chris Kilshaw, Gavin Harrison, Guy Williams, Nick Petit
2D Lead Compositor: Tilman Paulin
Compositors: Mike Bell, Paul Stirling, Nik Brownlee, Dean Koonjul, Patrick Nagle, Isaac Layish
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.