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Millimeter2012 Step by Step
Nov 13, 2009 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
All of the CG elements were rendered in RenderMan. "We had massive render times," Poe says. "The airplane itself was a really dense model, and we couldn't render all the buildings together. These buildings are mirror-like, and you can see the reflections of one building on another. Each frame was 100-plus megabytes of image layers and three-dimensional data."
"We made a point of rendering things out in lots of passes—not just beauty passes, but Fresnel passes and depth passes," Leo says. "We broke out reflections and refractions that could be recombined in the composite so that our compositors had as much control over the shot as possible. Sometimes there were 100 render passes, with each pass having 20 layers."
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"Storm is a very powerful system for rendering volumes, but there had to be a lot of integration," Leo says. "The smoke simulations had to be based on the rigid body simulations, and then we had to render them with the correct holdouts because all of these details had to be layered on top of each other within the smoke."
Compositing was handled with Nuke, a program originally developed at Digital Domain and currently available through The Foundry. "Nuke allowed us to work flexibly," Leo says. "Our compositors could add elements in the far background without having to go back through layout, rendering, and lighting. That happened on occasion, like when Roland said, 'I want to see more shaking palm trees in the distance.' We had a library of prerendered shaking palm trees, and because there is a 3D application in Nuke, we could basically add those details during compositing."
When the digital dust finally settled, the studio had created around 32,000 shattering windows and dozens of simulations per shot. "This is one of those movies where the amount of detail we could add was limited only by time," Leo says. "I can't remember very many occasions when Roland said, 'That's too much. Don't add any more!'"
Credit Roll
Director: Roland Emmerich
Visual Effects Supervisors: Volker Engel, Marc Weigert (for Uncharted Territory)
Previz: Pixomondo
For Digital Domain:
Visual Effects Supervisor: Mohen Leo
Digital Effects Supervisor: Darren M. Poe
Computer Graphics Supervisor: David J. Stephens
CG Effects Animation Lead: Mårten Larsson
CG Effects Animators: Brian Gazdik, Jaymie Miguel
CG Lighting Artist: Dann Tarmy
CG Modeling Lead: Brian Christian
Animators: Chad Finnerty, Jack Geckler
Digital Environments Lead: Andres Martinez
Digital Compositing Lead: Jason Selfe
Digital Compositor: Francis Puthanangadi
Software Engineer: Nafees Bin Zafar
Technical Developer: Ramprasad Sampath
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.