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MillimeterStep by Step:
Syriana
Feb 1, 2006 1:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
Virtual Volatility
In the Warner Bros. release Syriana, writer-director Stephen Gaghan dramatizes Middle East energy politics by staging confrontations for maximum intrigue. A pivotal clash occurs when a terrorist-manned speedboat launches an attack on a huge tanker ship containing domes of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Filming such an LNG tanker for real would have been impossible, according to Visual Effects Supervisor Greg Strause of Hydraulx, the Santa Monica, Calif., studio tapped to create CG effects. Strause says, “From my understanding, the insurance company people said, ‘What? You're making a movie about a terrorist attack in the Middle East, and you want to work with a 1,000ft. boat full of explosive gas?’ So basically, the plan was to shoot a normal freighter, and then put these domes on top using CG. The domes signify that it's an LNG tanker as opposed to an oil tanker.”
Hydraulx began by researching the available material on LNG tankers, including references supplied by Visual Effects Supervisor Eric Durst. “We found some cross-sectional technical diagrams, almost like architectural drawings,” says Strause. “The Internet was a wonderful resource. One of the references we found was for the exact model and make of the tanker that they wanted. A lot of these kinds of tankers are one-offs — no two ships ever look the same — so a lot of consideration went into this. We handed those dimensions over to our modeling team, which was able to start working even before the plates were shot. Our modeling and look development teams were working for a couple of months while the production was shooting in the Middle East.” By the time the plate photography arrived, the models were about 40 percent complete.
Hydraulx's team used Alias Maya running on Linux-based workstations to build the CG domes. They worked from rough story-boards, and not from a full previz, recalls Strause. “Often with visual effects movies today, things are very rigid and planned,” he says. “But when you're on the open seas trying to shoot boats, the reality was that we could have planned all we wanted, but we'd get what we get. Things were a little more free-form.”
Hydraulx rendered test perspectives of the CG tankers to keep Durst abreast of the CG's progress. “All the lighting and shaders were done in [Mental Images] Mental Ray, and the textures required a lot of custom Mental Ray shaders,” explains Strause. “What wasn't custom Mental Ray was done in [Adobe] Photoshop.” He stresses that Mental Ray's global illumination capabilities were crucial for calculating the bounce light that's necessary to simulate daylight exterior photography. “The LNG domes are white,” he says, “and lots of reflected energy comes off of anything that's white. They're like big bounce cards.”
When the plate photography arrived, Hydraulx had to track some of the shots using Boujou Three tracking software from 2d3. “The sequence takes place at the dock where the LNG tanker is filled up,” says Strause. “But some of the shots are from over the shoulders of the terrorists, and we're on the boat that's cutting through open seas at high speeds. It's very frenetic, and there's lots of camera shake. We were also dealing with the boat riding up and down through the water.” For certain shots, Strause's team also had to do some handwork. “When you track in 3D there are still small errors. So we'd need to go to [Autodesk] Inferno and re-track and stabilize everything to make all the elements stick together nicely.”
Another necessity was rotoscoping, for which Hydraulx used Autodesk Combustion. “In some of the shots there was a ‘nest’ of pipes that you're looking through to see the LNG tanks in the background,” explains Strause. “All of those foreground elements had to be rotoscoped so we could comp the CG behind them. Our Combustion team had to create some fairly intricate mattes.”
Strause also notes, “There were shots on the open seas where a terrorist's head and body cross in front of the LNG tanks. There's no way to have a bluescreen when you're out on the open seas. So there was a lot of rotoing of his hair and shirt blowing around. Sometimes it just takes old-fashioned brute force!”
For compositing, Hydraulx used Inferno. Strause says, “The thing about our Inferno setup is that we make use of a Linux rendering tool from Autodesk called Burn. The Infernos are fairly expensive workstations, so, instead of having the artists tie up their boxes doing rendering with them, they just submit their work to the render queue. We have 48 Xenon processors on the Linux render queue for Burn. So we can offload their processing onto the network. The Inferno might not be the newest box in town, but it is still super-productive because of the speed of this big render farm.”
Hydraulx also relied on its proprietary, web-based asset management system to handle the effects for Syriana as efficiently as possible. “From start to finish it probably took close to nine months,” estimates Strause. “But we were done months before the movie came out — and that is definitely not the norm!”
Credit Roll
| Director - | Stephen Gaghan |
| Director of Photography - | Robert Elswit |
| Visual Effects Supervisor - | Eric Durst |
| For Hydraulx: | |
| Visual Effects Supervisors - | Greg Strause, Colin Strause |
| Senior Inferno Artists - | Erik Liles, Bill Kunin |
| Inferno Artist - | Andrew Edwards |
| Compositors - | Chris Payne, Daisuke Morita |
| 3D Supervisor - | Chris Wells |
| 3D Lighting - | Oliver Arnold |
| 3D Modelers - | Yoshiya Yamada, Shigeharu Tomotoshi |
| 3D Camera Tracking - | Rina Strause |
