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In the film “Knight & Day”, vfx house Rhythm & Hues got the job of creating a herd of stampeding bulls in full CG, and adding them to several chase scenes in a variety of environments including a stadium, the city streets, and eventually some traffic.  Over at FXGuide they discuss the process in-depth, including their own custom little gadget, the HDReye.

“We have a little box called a HDReye, a little cube that has a camera on each side that we developed about 5 years ago. It takes bracketed photography in about 30 seconds to give out a whole HDRI. Because the environments were so diffuse on this show, it worked out well in terms of not having a 4K HDRI. It was more about 2K.” Standard gray and mirror balls were also used, as well a mock-up of a bull with horns. “And of course we had the real bulls in the shots,” added Steele. “For about 3 shots, we augmented the shots with CG bulls so they were right next to real ones. It was really huge just to have that. How dark the bull skin gets in the shadows, the brightness on the horns, how much spec you get on the tip of the nose.”

via fxguide – maya:after effects:avid – Knight & Day.

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Rhythm & Hues had the task of bringing over 100 VFX shots to life for the recent “Marmaduke” CG/Live Action movie, and used the power of NVidia Quadro cards to do much of it in real-time.

“While working on such a large number of concentrated CG characters and animations for a film like ‘Marmaduke’, the ability to use NVIDIA Quadro GPUs for real-time 2K playback with color correction was essential to realizing our production pipeline,” said Nathan Cournia, R&H software engineer.

via Rhythm & Hues Takes “Marmaduke” from the Comic Strip.

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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

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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.

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Creating a fantastic world of freaks and vampires that run a traveling circus that is secretly a neutral ground between two warring tribes of vampires is no small feat, and the necessary effects to pull it off landed at Rhythm & Hues.

Tools consisted of usual R&H proprietary software: Rhythm for character animation and, in terms of choreography and the renderer, a package similar to Houdini. A lot of the atmospherics, in fact, were done in Houdini.

As usual, work was split between L.A. and India, where they are fully integrated into the pipeline and their crew shares digital assets and they video conference daily. “India supplies everything from animators to lighters to compositors. We ship all things in our pipeline back and forth. Depending on our needs, not everything will get done in India. Alexander Ribs’ [Orlando Jones] dancing shots were done by the animators in India and they videotaped themselves doing the dancing to get the hip movements right.”

Cirque du VFX and Vampires | AWN | Animation World Network.

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Rhythm & Hues was brought in to make several of the effects for “Aliens in the Attic”, and talks about it to FXGuide in a new interview.

We use an HDRI camera that was specially built by Rhythm & Hues. It’s a cube-shaped camera with a lens on each side of the cube, which measures five inches on each side, so it’s fairy small. It mounts on a tripod on the corner of the cube. The HDRI camera takes a series of exposures that go from the deepest blacks to the brightest highlights and get the colour information out of the scene in a wide exposure – what we call a wedge. In addition to that, we use a chrome and gray ball pass.

Read the full article for the rest of the details, and various in-progress shots showing the composited frames.

via fxguide – visual effects school – Aliens in the Attic – Rhythm & Hues.

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Over at VFXWorld, Bill Desowitz talks to David Jones about some of the effects created for The Time Traveler’s Wife and how they worked with Rhythm & Hues.

BD: What was the primary software that was used?

DJ: Primarily Maya, Fusion and Inferno: the holy trinity of visual effects. And Maya nCloth for additional clothing work for Henry during the various time travels.

….. >> VFXWorld / Feature Articles << …...

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The guys at FXGuide sit down with Rhythm & Hues to discuss the tools and techniques they used to build some of the VFX shots.

fxg: What approach did you take to modelling and animating the dinosaur?

BW: We use Maya for a lot of our modelling here. We also used zBrush to do the detailed work. Our art director, Chris Grun, is also an amazing creature designer. He guided the zBrush artists to put in all the scale detail. We’ve done films in the past with other animals where you gather up as much reference as possible.

via fxguide – visual effects news – Land of the Lost : Rhythm & Hues.

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One of the most complicated rigs Rhythm and Hues has ever built is the Octopus from Night at the Museum 2.  They sit down with CGSociety to discuss how it was built.

“The outer skin consisted of multiple layers of 8/16-bit displacement maps, created in Photoshop, and 32-bit displacement maps generated in Mudbox, ranging from the bumpy skin and veins, to the smoother tentacle bottoms, and the ridges of the suckers, to the wrinkles around the eyes and gills.”

via CGSociety – Night at the Museum 2.

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If you’re in the LA area next week, you might want to check out an LA ACM SIGGRAPH gathering on June 9th (Tuesday) at 6:30pm.

Come celebrate the conclusion of the successful LA ACM SIGGRAPH 2009 2009 season Featuring a behind the scenes presentation of the VFX of “Night at the Museum Battle of the Smithsonian” with Francisco Rodriguez FX supervisor of Rhythm & Hues. A screening of the film will immediately follow the presentation.

ID’s will be checked (it is being held at a brewery afterall), and the first 150 attendees admitted get a free mousepad from Side Effects.  They’ll also be raffling off 3 licenses of “Houdini Master Apprentice HD”, valued at $99 each.

via Houdini Sponsors – LA ACM SIGGRAPH Event – Side Effects Software Inc..

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