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Step by Step: Aeon Flux

Jan 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff

2D Touches to a 3D World

Stylized settings abound in Aeon Flux, Paramount Pictures' sci-fi confection with MTV roots and Charlize Theron to boot. Designing the look of the film's futuristic environments required substantial give and take between The Orphanage in San Francisco and Digital Domain in Los Angeles. In one particularly revealing shot, The Orphanage's CG team pulls the camera back from a single apartment window to a POV high above the city where the story unfolds. The lengthy pullback shot ultimately resolves on a model of the city as seen in a museum under glass. Moving from the active city to its presentation as a static model makes a story point, notes The Orphanage's Visual Effects Supervisor Jonathan Rothbart. “It helps tell the story of how the city came to be.”

“It's not just a straight-out ‘Powers of Ten,’ shot,” says Rothbart, referring to the famous short film by Charles and Ray Eames that pulls back from earth to outer space. “We move horizontally through the city for quite some time. It's a pretty linear move, but it's not straight up. What's always tough about ‘Powers of Ten’ shots is getting the level of detail correct at each stage. You need to have an extensive amount of detail when you're right on top of something, but as you get further away, those details no longer work and you have to recalibrate. In addition, we were starting from a real city with people inside it and moving out to end up as model. It took a lot of wrangling.”

Except for storyboards and concept art, the only materials given to The Orphanage were plate photography of one actress seen at the start of the shot and museumgoers seen at the end. Rothbart explains, “We had a top-down map of what it should look like, but when we started designing the city itself, we had to make it functional — with industrial, residential, and government areas connected by canals and monorails. People have seen enough cities to know what they should look like. You can only cheat so much for the sake of being futuristic.

“While we were busy being city engineers, we also had an architectural team designing independent buildings,” continues Rothbart. “We did a lot of building designs before we even started a single camera move. We first did concepts of key frames of the scale of where our camera would be. That helped us design the city as we went along, and it also helped us design the camera move itself.”

The team modeled the 3D geometry using Alias Maya, and then handled lighting and look development with Autodesk 3ds Max, both running on Windows workstations. That software combination allowed The Orphanage to use the Max-friendly rendering software Brazil from Splutterfish. Rothbart notes, “The Splutterfish guys actually work out of The Orphanage, so we have close ties.” The studio itself has developed inhouse tools to make Maya work with Max, and is currently developing a Maya-to-Brazil rendering system.

In addition to rendering the necessary 3D buildings, Rothbart's team created 16 matte paintings to flesh out specific details at key points in the shot. The matte paintings were done using Adobe Photoshop CS2, which allowed The Orphanage's artists to paint everything in extended color space.

Rothbart, who previously worked as a digital artist at ILM on films like Men in Black and Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, says, “I find it difficult to get everything I want out of an environment without doing some level of matte painting. The finishing touch for us is always to take whatever we've rendered, re-project it, and then paint on it to get it greater detail. I don't want to agonize over making sure we get every piece of dirt and reflection right in 3D. I'd much rather get 90 percent of the way there and then use paint to finish the job. If I had tried to do this all in 3D, I probably could get to a place that felt good. But I can get there a month earlier and then spend those extra weeks fine tuning it to look perfect from an artistic standpoint, and not spend the time trying to solve the technical problems of how to get the shot rendered.”

In addition to the cityscape, the shot also included animated water, created with an inhouse tool and then dropped into Max and rendered in Brazil. There were also Maya-animated monorails and people, as well as photographed actors added to the mix. The team decided to keep the amount of city activity fairly sparse so that there wouldn't be an abrupt change when the shot moved outward from the “real” city to the museum model. The moment of transition happens as the camera pulls out through a CG glass dome in the museum's display.

The Orphanage used Adobe After Effects to composite what Rothbart calls endless numbers of passes. “The number of layers in the comp was immense,” he says. “But I'm a believer in having a lot to work with during compositing. It's a pain on the front end, but on the back end, we can quickly handle whatever changes the director wants. When you don't break out passes, if a comment comes in, you have to render out a matte to control what you need to do. That's the nature of the beast.”

In the end, Rothbart's approach made the compositing process highly interactive. “Quite often, I'd sit with a compositor and look at densities and colors and start dialing things in. It's very similar to a [Discreet] Flame session. Without all the necessary render passes, you can't do that sort of thing. With a big beast of a shot like this one,” he concludes, “it made life so much easier.”

Credit Roll

Director -	Karyn Kusama
Aeon Flux Creator -	Peter Chung
Visual Effects Producer -	Ellen Somers
For The Orphanage:
Visual Effects Supervisor -	Jonathan Rothbart
Visual Effects Producer -	Sharon Fitzgerald
Visual Effects Production Supervisor -	Yvette Memory
Computer Graphics Supervisor -	Shadi Almassizadeh
Digital Artists -	Irfan Celik, Nathan Reidt
Lead Compositor -	Alex Henning
Modeler -	Ryan Lastimosa
Matte Painting Supervisor -	Ryan Lastimosa
Matte Painters -	Ting Lo, Emmanuel Shiu, Kristi Valk

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.