CGSociety has a fantastic interview and writeup on the various people and technologies used in District9. Expected to be a 2-part feature, part 1 is online and covers the work done by Vancouver’s ImageEngine. They get into some great details such as Marco MEnco’s work on the “Prawns”.
Marco’s specialty was poly-modeling and texturing of the aliens and the clothes. Starting from a 3D scan of the clay model provided by WETA Workshop, the IE crew re-topologized the model and then cleaned the geometry in Maya to prepare it for rigging. Playing with lots of different aspects of character creation, they used ZBrush mostly for texturing, for gross displacement for background clothes. “I was pretty excited to work with the ‘marquette’ of Christopher Johnson (the main alien) on my desk, especially thinking that was done by the great artists at WETA,” explains Menco.
They also get into the details of managing the huge amount of assets involved in the alien textures and models, using an in-house tool called Jabuka.
“Jabuka is an asset management and shot setup system written in python using a postgreSQL database backend,” adds Nigel Denton-Howes, Modeling and Texturing Supervisor. “Many of its shot-end lighting tools are built upon the cortex libraries open sourced by Image Engine. Jabuka was designed to handle version control of assets, shot setup and interdepartmental dependencies once in shots.” Although Jabuka was used and useful on every shot in ‘District 9’, it really shines in shots with large numbers of creatures.
