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Wondertouch ParticleIllusion

Sep 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Steve Pugh Eden FX

Flexible Tool for Effects on a Deadline

Eden FX, a digital effects facility located in Hollywood, provides Emmy award-winning visual effects for feature films and television. Our work takes us from the underground catacombs and submerged corridors of the feature film Hellboy to the outer reaches of the galaxy on the television series Star Trek: Enterprise.

As our clients become increasingly sophisticated and their projects become increasingly demanding, we find ourselves constantly tackling new challenges. More often than not, we are called upon to supply invisible effects-, in addition to fantastic creatures and space battles. We are asked to give life to a prosthetic makeup, give breath to creature puppets, or provide that last kiss of realism to a live-action effects gag.

We work across a variety of media — some of our clients still work at SD video resolution, but more and more of our work is done at high definition or at full 2K.

To stagnate in this industry is to invite disaster, so we are always looking for ways to wring the next level of performance out of our toolkits and for elegant and efficient solutions to these challenges. One solution is Wondertouch's ParticleIllusion.

One of our first opportunities to check out ParticleIllusion's abilities came during our work on Hellboy. Initially contracted to provide approximately 70 shots for the film, when all was said and done, we delivered more than 200 shots. We were under a very tight deadline on this project, so every tool had to perform. For one sequence, we had to deliver two shots of a smoke effect that would arise after Hellboy catches rosary beads in his hand and the crucifix burns his palm on contact.

Using ParticleIllusion, the production crew could easily track a smoke element onto the moving footage and quickly dial in just the right amount of speed, drift, turbulence, and opacity. In a library shootout sequence, Hellboy blasts through huge columns while trying to kill a demon, sending chunks of the columns flying. On-set charges provided some punch, but the director wanted more damage and intensity. Again, we turned to ParticleIllusion for a quick turnaround, adding smoke, sparks, and debris to the explosions.

In another sequence from the film, Hellboy rips a piece of machinery from a wall and smashes it into another wall, causing the piece of machinery to gush steam. In the initial shots, the existing steam was weak and corrupted by wires supporting the prop. With ParticleIllusion, we were able to quickly match the existing steam, track the nozzle onto the film plate, and effectively triple the amount of steam, giving the shot the appropriate look and feel.

Many of ParticleIllusion's built-in effects fit into this type of shot, right out of the box. What really blew the artists' minds, though, was how quickly and easily they could take the library of effects and build on them, which has proven to be a lifesaver on many occasions. A large part of our work for science-fiction television involves the creation of various nebulae, spatial distortions, and exotic weaponry.

The ability to navigate through our library of previously created particle effects and to see them in motion is a great way to sketch what used to take many hours worth of design work.

Stock footage of explosions, smoke, and fire has long been a staple of visual effects facilities, but audiences these days are increasingly sophisticated and can spot a stock pyrotechnics element from a mile away. Layering in a new, custom element gives the shot a fresh look and gives the viewer something they haven't seen before. Without a tool like ParticleIllusion, that extra zing would become a tedious process and the shot would suffer greatly.

Furthermore, tracking these stock elements into a 3D-rendered sequence can be laborious. Generating custom elements in ParticleIllusion and using its tracking tools makes the process much simpler. In one sequence from Enterprise, involving a shuttlecraft crashing onto a dusty asteroid, ParticleIllusion allowed us to use the shuttle's path, tracked in Adobe After Effects, to generate a realistic trail of dust when the shuttle lands. We could play the sequence over and over in ParticleIllusion, changing the look and behavior of the dust as we went. We generated several passes of dust in a fraction of the time it would have taken to generate the dust in 3D or to shoot elements and line them up.

New uses for a tool like ParticleIllusion are popping up all the time, but one of the more surprising instances was during production on a recent Nokia commercial. Our artist needed to develop a flashing, psychedelic, disco dance floor for our computer-generated cell phones to dance on. Instead of struggling with designing an effect in our 3D package, he used ParticleIllusion to produce a number of different patterns, flashing dozens of bright neon squares in numerous combinations. The result was a quick approval process with the client, and the final shot had all of the punch and energy that they had hoped for. I had become used to seeing ParticleIllusion used for organic effects and volumetric renderings, but it was great to see it used for something completely different from my expectations.

Part of the gauge by which a tool's effectiveness can be measured is by how often you reach for it. The usage of a package that is cumbersome, marginally effective, or limited in its scope, speed, or integration with the rest of the pipeline will steadily decline until it sits on the shelf and collects dust. ParticleIllusion, on the other hand, is a tool that our artists are reaching for more and more as they continue to find new and unexpected uses for it.

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Established in 2000 by visual effects and postproduction notables John Gross and Mark Miller, Hollywood-based Eden FX offers its clients the creation and production of original imagery for projects in all media, including television, film, music video, commercials, and the Internet.

The company specializes in visual effects work in the areas of 3D animation, character animation, 3D tracking, compositing, direction, on-set supervision, and conceptual design and consultation. For more information, visit www.edenfx.com.

© 2009 Penton Media, Inc.