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
The A-Team always did enjoy blowing stuff up or riddling harmless vehicles and scenery with bulletholes, and the new movie is no different. Bringing together the talents of Digital Domain, Prime Focus, MPC, Rhythm & Hues and more, an article on FXGuide discusses some of the more impressive shots from the film.
Digital Domain contributed about 100 visual effects shots featuring a digital tunnel, Baghdad backgrounds, composites and gunfire. “I thought they did a really nice job of set-dressing the street,” noted DD visual effects supervisor Kelly Port, “but we wanted to make sure that there were additional Middle Eastern elements like mosques in there off in the distance that helped make the skyline more realistic. We used Nuke for compositing and took advantage of Nuke’s 3D capabilities. We could re-project some photographic backgrounds onto some geometry and then re-photograph it with the foreground camera so that they tied together much better – the perspective is lined up perfectly and tracks perfectly.
via fxguide
Graphics digitaldomain, movie, mpc, prime focus, rhythm&hues, vfx
“Clash of the Titans” was widely panned by critics, and heavily criticized for the poor use of post-processed 3D, but the CG was actually quite well-done. CGNews has some details from MPC on the creation of the final sequence with the Kraken.
For the final sequence, MPC created the Kraken and a CG ocean. To achieve a fully realistic fluid animation over 20 passes of water were used, combining volumetric rendering for water particles and mesh rendering for the water surface. All fluids were done using Flowline and rendered through RenderMan. MPC also created the FX for the ‘rockifying’ Kraken. To achieve the shattering effect, MPC used proprietary software PAPI.
via MPC Play War With Clash of The Titans | CGnews.
Graphics movie, mpc, vfx
SlashFilm has a great colleciton of 41 high-resolution stills from the upcoming “Clash Of The Titans” movie, with a several page story detailing the story of the film, how it relates to the original, and how the CGI monsters were brought to life. The biggest CGI creation is the biggest and baddest monster in all of Argos, the Kraken, and features the work of several companies and designers including MPC.
The design phase for the Kraken–the most feared beast in all of Argos–took a period of approximately five months. Davis relates, “Aaron Sims, our character designer, worked with Louis and me and the art team until we had something everyone was happy with, and then the people at MPC (Moving Picture Company) took over to work through the texture, and so on. The water was also a huge element. The Kraken rises out of the sea, so it’s got water cascading off of it on a massive scale, but part of it is always in the water, thrashing around. It was quite a challenge.”
“Clash of the Titans” comes to theaters April 2nd.
via 41 High Resolution Photos from Clash of the Titans | /Film.
Graphics movie, mpc, vfx
MPC made the VFX of 5 important creatures in the new “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” movie, and VFX Supervisor Guillaume Rocheron discusses the technology and difficulties of the work.
Hades was very challenging as fire was a major component of the character and had to be both extremely detailled and very controllable according to his performance. Our FX team pushed the fire simulations to a much higher resolution than we’ve done previously to ensure details were contributing to the motion and not only added as a post-process. The simulations were computed at a voxel size of under 1mm and then plugged into MPC’s rendering system to generate accurate illumination onto the character. The team used the same methodology to create the Lost Souls, producing super natural fire, shaped and timed specifically for every shot.
In addition to the fire simulations of Hades, they discuss the hair simulation used for the Minotaur and the Hellhounds.
via Percy Jackson and the Olympians; The Lightning Thief.
Graphics movie, mpc, percyjackson, vfx
French media technology company “Thomson” has just filed for “Safeguard”, which is the French equivalent of Chapter 11, to provide time to vote on and implement a debt restructing plan.
Chief executive Frederic Rose said: “After 10 months of constructive discussions with a majority of our creditors, I am satisfied that we have now a clear timetable for closing our debt restructuring. [Safeguard] allows us to provide clarity and certainty to our employees, customers, suppliers and shareholders.”
Apparently they have been in discussions throughout most of 2009 with their creditors, and have a plan that will be voted on on December 21st. Why might you care? Thomson owns Technicolor, the parent company of MPC.
via Thomson gains protection from creditors | News | Broadcast.
Graphics debt, financial, mpc
MPC’s Evian Spot “Skating Babies” just received the honor of being inducted into the Guinness Book of Records for Most Viewed Online Advertisement.
Adding up views for various versions of the ad across video sharing websites, the Guinness Book of Records has bestowed the honour on the ad for having 45,166,109 views as of 9 November 2009.
It’s a great commercial if you haven’t seen it, and deserving of the honor.
via Evian roller babies makes Guinness Book of Records with 45 million online views – Brand Republic News – Brand Republic.
Graphics commercial, evian, mpc, vfx
The popular “Skating Babies” commercial for Evian was done by MPC, and their latest podcast shows how they did the commercial and interviews some of the Visual Effects wizards behind the magic.
Promo – MPC Podcast.
Graphics breakdown, commercial, makingof, mpc, vfx
MPC has updated their website with some behind-the-scenes VFX breakdowns of what you can see in the upcoming film Dorian Gray.
Promo – VFX Breakdowns.
Graphics breakdown, dorian gray, movie, mpc, vfx
In Jennifer’s Body, Megan Fox slowly transforms from a beautiful high-school girl into an evil man-slaying succubus demon. The transformation takes progress over the entire movie and involved a lot of fancy camera work and visual effects magic from MPC.
“Stage one is beautiful Jennifer and then two and three were strictly makeup where her eyes become more recessed and she would start to look plain like the rest of us. And stage four was some custom dentures that KNB made for her, and then visual effects in stage four was mainly facial warping and recessing her eyes some more and having a pinning effect to her irises and a variety of other musculature deforms, just bringing her cheek bones down more.
via Jennifer’s Body: Jaw Dropping VFX | AWN | Animation World Network.
Graphics movie, mpc, vfx
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