Giant Killer Robots Make Fantastic Four into
the Real Thing Hmmm ... Giant Killer Robots makes
Fantastic Four? Sounds like a hell of a sequel, doesn't it? But
hold up: we're already getting ahead of ourselves. Let's stick with
the news at hand. Considering the comic's pedigree, Fantastic
Fourstarring Jessica Alba (The Invisible Woman), Michael Chiklis
(The Thing), Chris Evans (The Human Torch) and Ioan Gruffudd (Mr.
Fantastic)has been a very long time in coming. The undeniably
human, unutterably cool, quartet of less-than-perfect superheroes
is older than this reporter (and that is saying something), yet
this is their very first live action trip to the big screen. The
good news is that director Tim Story's version of the long-time
favorite comic series is more than worth the wait, not least
because of the astounding effects work of San Francisco-based GKR,
who not only created the convincing flames powering Johnny "The
Human Torch" Storm, but also used SOFTIMAGE|XSI to create
incredibly realistic urban landscapes for him to fly through.
Fantastic Four represented a lot of firsts for GKR," says Michael
Schmitt, Visual Effects Artist at GKR. "For starters, with over 200
effects shots, this is the biggest production we've ever worked on,
although our work on shows such as Blade: Trinity, Matrix Reloaded
and Matrix Revolutions prepared us for it. We were also the primary
vendor on this show, which is another first for us. We worked on
Fantastic Four for over nine months, during which time the project
grew considerably in scope. We're used to operating with about 35
people, but we had about 80 working on this project. Typically, we
like to keep things small and beautiful here, but we have the space
and the pipeline to tackle the big jobs as well. It really is the
best of both worlds." GKR founding partner Peter Oberdorfer served
as one of the main VFX supervisors on Fantastic Four, working
closely with Kurt Williams, the film's Visual Effects Director.
Even with such close contact to the ongoing production, however,
the mind-blowing effects and environments required by Fantastic
Four proved a serious challenge, even to a bunch of immense
homicidal androids. "Every job has its challenges," admits Schmitt.
"There were effects shots on this show, however, where we were just
scratching our heads, if not pulling our hair out, wondering how
the hell we were going to get it done." Adding to the effects
crew's scalp scraping was the fact that the film's denouement, a
massive fight scene between the fantastic ones and their metallic
arch-nemesis, Dr. Doom required a believable environment in which
to occur. A fight scene on this scale could only happen in New York
City, but it would have been impossible to shoot within the real
thing. Never ones to shrink from a challenge, the Robots turned to
their own talents and SOFTIMAGE|XSI: "We used SOFTIMAGE|XSI
exclusively on all of the virtual environments," says Schmitt.
"From the beginning, we knew XSI would be the best choice, mainly
because the system would allow us to divide up a huge amount of
data into Render Passes. In the end, it was mainly memory,
organization and speed that convinced us to go with XSI when
creating these caverns of Manhattan." And the superheroes fall into
and fly through a great many of those caverns, causing untold
damage and destruction as they do so. In order to generate a truly
photo-realistic Manhattan, GKR commandeered a helicopter to capture
aerial footage of the city's skyline and snapped thousands of
reference pictures from high atop skyscrapers and right down at
street level. "Using SOFTIMAGE|XSI helped a great deal, especially
because it enable us to automatically create mental ray map files,
which went a long way in avoiding time-consuming errors. That was a
fantastic feature for us, because there were so many texture maps
and so many models involved."
Although the team modeled and textured all the cars and people
within the virtual environments, GKR's timeline was helped somewhat
by a virtual library of buildings fortuitously provided by
Twentieth-Century Fox. The image library meant that GKR could avoid
the time-consuming task of modeling the many buildings in the
scenes, but they were still faced with a seemingly unmanageable
amount of data: "We used SOFTIMAGE|XSI to organize all the data,
set up all the appropriate shaders, reattach textures and so on,"
explains Schmitt. "We then came up with a method of laying out a
street and rendering out all the buildings, cars, people, etc., and
making it look totally real. We started with one building and built
a shader that allowed us to create about ten different render
passes. There's an expression built into that shader that turns on
by flipping from one render pass to another and therefore
controlled which channel in the render we'd be using for that
render pass. From that point, we were able to lay out scenes very
easily, placing buildings wherever we needed them. Render Passes
were then just set up automatically. Once we had one or two shots
under our belts, the others proceeded very smoothly and quickly. It
worked wonderfully." The GKR team also made a few new discoveries
along the way: "With so many materials, we had to find a way to
speed up the process," says Schmitt. "We discovered a way of using
an Custom Parameter node, attaching an expression to it, and then
driving it with a render pass. That really increased the speed of
switching from one render pass to another, so we set it up and used
it all the way through. It was great."
All supporting images within this article are copyright,
and cannot be printed, published, or copied without written
permisson from 20th Century Fox
We would like to thank our Guest Columnist Michael Abraham Article reprinted
with permission from SOFTIMAGE|XSI July 4th, 2005 |
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