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As good ole Captain Jack Sparrow returns for his 4th adventure, Cinesite was involved in creating the old classic London and other environments.  Using shots from the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, they used a special proprietary tool called ‘CsPhotoMesh’ to help in geometric reconstruction of the scene.  FXGuide has all the details.

“Given a set of digital images of a static scene, CsPhotoMesh produces a textured 3D mesh accurately representing the scene geometry and 3D cameras matching the original photos positions,” explains Stanley-Clamp. “The tool is fully automatic. All it requires is to drop all the images in a directory and run the command. This kicks off a reconstruction process on our renderfarm resulting in a 3D mesh and camera positions ready for texturing.”

via London calling for Pirates 4 at Cinesite | fxguide.

Graphics cinesite, movie, vfx

Los Angeles is doomed in the upcoming film “Battle: Los Angeles”.  Aliens, marines, helicopters, and spaceships were all on tap for the new film, and CGSociety has an interview up with Cinesite’s Ben Shepherd on how they brought it to life.

The aftermath of a battle on Santa Monica Pier, and the ongoing ground battle with the aliens pushing forward was another sequence Cinesite had their work cut out on. The sequence where the aliens landed served up the giant rings of smoke. This was the way the meteors containing aliens were shown landing at the Santa Monica beach. These were all done with Maya Fluids. “We wrote our own proprietary renderer which solved the problem of gathering the best rate for creating this,” explains Shepherd. “We added extra frequency detail, so we could do a lo-rez render on the inital run, then you break it up on the farms to add more detail.”

CGSociety – Battle: Los Angeles.

Graphics cinesite, movie, vfx

Over at FXGuide, they have a great writeup of the various effects in the new Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie.  Covering work done by MPC, Framestore, Cinesite, and others, it goes into incredible detail of several of the effects.  I love the discussion of the “standing tidal wave” from the end of the movie.

Markers placed on the beach set out the proposed location of what was conceived as an enormous standing tidal wave. “Our problem was that it was to be on screen for minutes and minutes,” said Fawkner. “And in broad daylight. The other problem was how to realise the wave given that it was kind of alive but also static. We also had to work out just where all the water was actually coming from.”

Get all the gory details at their site.

via FXGuide

Graphics cinesite, framestore, movie, mpc, vfx

FXGuide has a great article up on the visual effects of The Price of Persia, discussing how Cinesite, MPC, Framestore, Double Negative, and NVizage all worked together to create the many VFX shots in the film.  In particular, I love the part about the similarities between crowds and cities.

Drawing on the underlying structure of MPC’s existing proprietary ALICE crowd system, Town Planner gave MPC an initial pass at the city that could be augmented with other surrounds like gardens, streets and trees, as well the surrounding mountainous environment. “Buildings are pretty much a crowd that doesn’t move,” noted Ceretti. “We already had layout tools for the crowds – why not make it similar? In the end, we stripped out everything we wouldn’t need in terms of simulation of crowd motion and just used it for layout, but it was still a huge render so we had to split up parts of the city and bake out different renders in RenderMan to make it possible.” In the end, this amounted to about 20,000 buildings and 180,000 props – things like canopies, piles of wood and pots. For shots of the invading army and other crowds in the city, the ALICE software was used to generate 10,000 agents made up of soldiers, flags, citizens, horses and camels, and then integrated into the city shots. Further projection work was done in both Shake and Nuke to allow for 3D space adjustments and other details to be added, along with the layering of atmospheric dust, mist and rays of light.

via fxguide – vfx knowledge – Prince of Persia.

Science cinesite, doublenegative, framestore, movies, mpc, nvizage, vfx

Cinesite had previous experience with CGI dogs from Underdog and Beverly Hills Chihuahua, but recent film Marmaduke required some extra work due to the many closeups and wide variety of breeds.  Over at FiredByDesign, they discuss how they created the various faces.

Cinesite used a hybrid technique which involved combining fully textured and lit CG passes with parts of the original photography re-projected over the animated geometry. To create the CG faces of the different canine characters, Matt’s team built base head models in Autodesk Maya using photographic references of the dog actors. Blend shapes based on individual muscle shapes were then integrated into the rig using in-house tools.

via Dog’s life «Fired By Design.

Graphics cinesite, vfx

The VFX of Marmaduke consisted largely of CG head replacement, done by Rhythm & Hues, CIS, and Cinesite.  Over at FXGuide, they have interviews with all three studios on their contributions and how they built the amazing talking dog.

For the surfing sequence, one of the biggest challenges was achieving the right scale. “That’s always a game between how fast things should move,” said O’Neal. “Everybody usually wants a fast-paced sequence, but almost all of the surfing reference we had was shot in slow motion. It’s a cascading effect because once you start the speed of one thing, that drives the speed of everything else. We ended up having all kinds of challenges – how fast could it go to the camera and still have it feel realistic, how much camera shake can you give it without making it feel like a miniature? How explosive can the white water be to make it look really powerful but doesn’t make it look small because it's going too fast? A lot of it was timing and re-running simulations and checking things.”

via fxguide – visual effects news – Marmaduke.

Graphics cinesite, cis, movie, rhythm&hues, vfx

Prince of Persia, the new movie based on the popular game, comes to theaters next week and features some fancy CG work by Cinesite.  DigitalArts talks to Sue Rowe, visual effects supervisor, and they discuss some of the effects and creations they made.

Another sequence required Cinesite to create a full CG lioness. Using Autodesk Maya, the lioness was generated to reflect a creature that looked starved and malnourished.

“We really wanted to present a lioness who was bordering on emaciated to emphasise her need to hunt,” said Rowe. “To achieve this look we graded the lioness to have washed-out coloured fur and deeply emphasised her bone structure around the rib cage and hips.”

via Cinesite details VFX work on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time – News – Digital Arts.

Graphics cinesite, movie, vfx

A press release from Cinesite talks about the VFX they created for the new Wolverine film, mostly centered around a single scene of Wolverine and his crew flying to Lagos.

The plane, a military version of an American Gulfstream business jet, was modeled from scratch. Detail right down to the interior of the cockpit were created to ensure absolute accuracy, as well as strobing navigation lights, landing lights (with interactive glow added to the surrounding clouds), engine glow, heat haze and vapor trails emanating from the wings.

The press release goes on to talk about using Houdini for the clouds, Nuke to export the camera data form Maya, and digital matte paintings for the ground and sky.

Full press release after the break.

Read more…

Graphics cinesite, movie, vfx