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MillimeterCG Actor Surfaces
Jan 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
John Gross feels he has come full circle through his work on NBC's Surface. As president of Eden FX, Hollywood, he spearheads the facility's digital effects on the show, collaborating with visual effects supervisor Mitch Suskin, whom Gross worked with on Star Trek. Before that, he was an original member of the SeaQuest DSV effects team for now-defunct Amblin Imaging. That was one of the first TV shows to utilize CG effects, and like Surface, it revolved around mysteries of the ocean — creating underwater effects on NewTek's Video Toaster system, which evolved into LightWave.
Animators, working in Lightwave 8.5, churn out sophisticated CG water shots and an all-CG character (above) weekly.
Eden now creates digital effects involving detailed interactions among real elements, CG elements, and CG water on a weekly basis for Surface. The show features the first recurring CG cast member on an episodic TV show — a baby sea monster dubbed Nimrod.
“We could never have done Surface in the ‘90s,” Gross explains, “largely because we have extensive character animation every week. We had underwater creatures [on SeaQuest], but they were murky and far away, and we had a dolphin that was CG in wide shots in the water, but not with facial expressions and blinking eyes and wagging fins and rippling muscles like we do now.”
For all CG water and animating Nimrod, Eden relies on LightWave (version 8.5) and developed a template approach for animating Nimrod each week.
“We have a default model of the creature rigged with bones for bending and moving setup, and then, depending on what shots the script calls for, we have to tailor him for that episode's needs,” Gross says. “But Nimrod is basically a character who does different things each week. So we can't pull old shots off the rack and re-use them. Each one is created from scratch, in a sense, and then much of the work involves using After Effects and Digital Fusion to composite him onto plates and make him interact with different elements.”
With such data-heavy imagery to work with (mirrored servers of 10TB to 12TB each are dedicated to the show), one concession Suskin made was to limit the amount of tracking shots.
“There is very little greenscreen work on the show,” he says. “Nimrod plates are usually shot in production with a rubber Nimrod stand-in that they made for the pilot, but it's not an acting puppet. We give the production a general lighting reference and an understanding of how he should be positioned, and that helps the actors work with the character. But for the most part, we have the ability to match the actors, rather than having them trying to figure out where we might put Nimrod. That means some shots involve rotoscoping.
“Lately, we have tightened up on tracking shots. You can track elements in the frame and we use [2d3's] Boujou for that. In a TV season, you lose a lot of the time you had early in the year for the initial episodes. This week, for instance, we have 65 shots to do in a week. So we asked the production to find solutions that do not involve camera moves or panning whenever possible. Therefore, they tend to shoot wide and then we can introduce a camera move or pan in post to give life to the shot. If they have to move the camera on set for creative reasons, then we hand-track it. But they have been great in limiting the amount of [on set] tracking and dollying, and that has reduced the amount of rotoscoping we do.”
