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Making of Golden Compass - Part II: Artist Feedback |
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Unlike the typical outsourcing scenario, where only manual intensive or back office operations as sent overseas, Rhythm & Hues India was involved in all stages of the creation of the visual effects and character animation on the movie. The Indian artists were involved from the early stages of previsualization of the characters and helped with various R&D exercises to determine the character of the daemons as well as the look for the transformation of the daemons from one form to another. The Indian artists were also involved in all stages of the creative process from modeling the characters, to tracking the footage, to animating the characters, lighting them, and then using final compositing to deliver the completed shots. Overall, over 150 employees in India worked on over one third of the animation and visual effects shots done by Rhythm & Hues.
The quality of the imagery from India integrated seamlessly with the rest of the world class work in the movie and is another landmark project showcasing the talent and passion of Indian artists on the global stage.
In this article we share a few of the experiences of the artists from Rhythm & Hues, India who worked on this Academy awards nominated feature..
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V.S.Kiran
Look development : The Alethiometer (the actual Golden compass instrument is called the "alethiometer" in the movie)
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Process :
Look development, or "lookdev" is the process of establishing the appearance / look of a rendered object. This involves painting textures for the cg object and setting up materials / shaders etc and tweaking them to the desired look. At Rhythm & Hues all of the cg props or characters go through this stage before they end up in different sequences / scenes and are rendered along with the other elements in the shot. It could have either a photoreal, stylized or a cartoony look.
Task :
I was assigned the task of doing the lookdev for the alethiometer. It was exciting and challenging to work on a prop that has so much significance in the movie, it features in the title of the movie after all!
Challenges :
The biggest challenge here was to match the look of the cg alethiometer to that of the real prop used in the film. To go into the details, the real Alethiometer looked worn and weathered like it has been handled or exposed to elements. On the outer sides it has these intricate cricular grid patterns with roman numerals etched inside the grid that are finer, recessed and are partly worn. I have started off by looking at some of the photographic reference of the Alethiometer that's been shot from all different angles, and also gathered some reference pics of brass metal to study its surface properties. Its really important to sit down and analyse the referance pictures, various properties that makes an object look the the way it looks before we jump in and do anything. This helps in determining what maps are needed and how to go about setting up the shaders A lot of time had gone into tracing and recreating the roman numerals and the circular grid pattern from the reference pictures that are on the top and the bottom of the compass and laying them on the texture maps. The 36 symbols on the inner dials were also recreated from the reference. Each of the symbols had to be painted bigger in size to preserve detail and then scaled down to fit the dial. As always working in teams always helps and my fellow team mates Rishi and Vishal who painstakingly traced these numerals from the photo reference. Since the reference pics are not big enough to extract any texture information out of it, we needed to paint most of the texutres from scratch.The textures were painted at 4k resolution and then eventually rendered with 2k maps, except the lid and the bottom of the Alethiometer that needed 4k maps because of the finer detail that was needed in color and displacements. Once the textures were done, the focus was on shading aspect of it, a lot of time was spent on tuning different components of the shaders to get the metal look right. This, I must say was the most difficult part which went on for several iterations. There's so much going on with the metal it was bit confusing to look at the photographic reference and tell where's the 'colour' coming from. There's a lot of variety in the metal with so many layers and elements.
Supervision from LA :
Since we have a highly integrated communication system with our LA studio we communicated via e-mails and also a few video conferences. The progress made everyday was sent to guides,leads & Supervisors for review and the next day we would get the feedback to work on it. Things got into rhythm pretty quickly and progress was constant which helped in achieving the goals in time. Overall it has been a awesome and rewarding experience for me to work on it, Hope to do more of this work in the future. And a big thanks to my managers and supervisors for entrusting me with these responsibilities.
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| Mukesh - Compositing |
The challenging part in terms of compositing was that the movie happens in various worlds & different diverse CG as well as live action backgrounds. This movie had many shots with long frame ranges where in we had to be really perfect in matching the CG characters with background in terms of colors, shadows & reflections.
Another major challenge was to match the golden monkey - Mrs.Coulter's (played by Nicole Kidman) daemon to the back ground , the monkey had to look golden no matter in which world he is in and he had to gel with the background. Numerous shots had the live characters interact closely with the CG characters like the actor's hands going through the CG fur which was really tricky & interesting to work on. In quite a few scenes, artists had to roto single strands of hair only to achieve proper integration of CG with live action. |
| Mayur - CameraTracking & Matchmoving |
| Speaking purely in terms of camera tracking and matchmoving, golden compass was a difficult show to handle. As there were some very complicated camera moves combined with some really long frame ranges. The camera tracks had to be pixel perfect as there were daemons (CG animals and birds) interacting with many actors in the same shot for the entire frame range? Matchmoves were also a big challenge. There were many shots with heavy interaction between the CG daemons and the actors for eg - CG birds sitting on the actor's shoulders, actors holding the CG daemon in their hands. The fact that the CG daemons had a lot of "furry" characters made matchmoving all the more complex. To achieve the high quality integration the matchmovers had to take extra care in making sure the accuracy of the mtahcmoves. Since camera tracking and matchmoving comes early on in the pipeline, departments like animation,lighting and compositing needed the tracked cameras and the matchmoved geometry to place the CG characters and cast shadows of CG daemons on live actors. So, the tracking department had to be very efficient in terms of using the time and schedule things accordingly so that none of the work for the departments down the line is affected. In all it was a good learning experience. |
| Nirmal - Animation |
| The "Golden Compass" was a unique project as far as animation was concerned because the artists faced challenges both from the aesthetic and technical aspects. The main challenges lay in the fact that the daemons were to look absolutely realistic and yet display identifiable human like emotions and interactions with their live action counterparts. This meant that the animators had to keep in mind the dynamics of a real animals movements and try and convey human emotions using typical animal body language and gestures.Needless to say it was a very interesting project to work on. To add to that, the daemons would morph into various animals...sometimes a small sparrow would morph into a wildcat 5 times his size..this was a very delicate situation...where the animator had to keep both animals as believable as possible while changing shape between them in a way that was pleasing to the eye. Some scenes contained call outs for a huge number of animals and this posed as a challenge in terms of just managing assets and keeping the consistency between the many animators working on a single scene. In a way this fun, for there was a lot interacting with other animators to get one scene to rise to the final level of quality. In my experience though the biggest challenges and the most interesting parts were shots where the animated daemons were interacting physically with their human actors. Any animator who has worked on a vfx project involving cg characters and humans will tell you that one of the most technically and aesthetically demanding part of our job is when a cg element is directly interacting or touching a live action actor. Many factors come into play here including many things beyond the animators control like how the actor has played the imaginary interaction during the actual filming and the interesting part here was almost like thinking backward where we had to make the audience believe that a touch from the actor causes changes in the cg character or vice-versa.This situation also required a very close working relationship with the matchmoving team and the lighting and compositing departments. The bottom line is......there was loads of fun to be had on "Golden Compass" and I think we juiced every last drop of it. |
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