"यह मित्रता फले-फूले, महके-महकाए..."
सभी सम्माननीय मित्रों को "मित्रता दिवस" की हार्दिक शुभकामनाएं.....
सभी सम्माननीय मित्रों को "मित्रता दिवस" की हार्दिक शुभकामनाएं.....
HAPPY FRIENDSHIP DAY
˚HAPPY FRIENDSHIP DAY to MY DEAR FRIENDssss ˚ ✰* ★
A single candle can illuminate an entire room. A true friend lights up an entire lifetime. Thanks for the bright lights of ur friendship.
!!!Celebrate FRIENDSHIP DAY With frnds!!!
!!!Celebrate FRIENDSHIP DAY With frnds!!!
Friendship day
˚HAPPY FRIENDSHIP DAY to MY DEAR FRIENDssss ˚ ✰* ★
"A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows you are slightly cracked!".
I wish you and all your friends a very Happy Friendship Day!
Tippett’s treasure trove of effects
Tippett Studio visual effects supervisor Matt Jacobs takes us through his studio’s work on the treasure vault sequence in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.
fxg: This is a scene that called for a mass of replicating treasure. Can you describe the sequence?
Jacobs: Harry, Ron and Hermione have returned to the Gringotts bank to find another horcrux to destroy, which is in Helga Hufflepuff’s Cup, in Bellatrix Lestrange’s vault. They enter the vault with Griphook the goblin and another goblin. The first thing we had to do was the lumos effect from the wand tips. That was
a mixture of 3D tracking and 2D compositing to create a very specific glow.
Then as they’re wandering through this dark environment with treasure every
where, Hermione knocks over a golden bracelet which falls on the floor. There’s a still moment as it starts trembling, and then it basically pops like popcorn. That was the way it was described to us. It replicates into several different other bracelets. Then Ron is startled by it and he knocks into a silver platter which falls on the floor, and a golden chalice falls. All those things begin to replicate as well. At this point the treasure just starts taking off. So
Hermione has the Sword of Gryffindor and she throws it to Harry while she is being surrounding by trea
sure. Harry starts climbing across this ever-expanding pile of treasure and pretty soon it’s a mountain. There’s a shot where we’re pushing in through Ron and Hermione who are up to their waists, and the pile is growing and Harry’s climbing up the treasure trying to get to the chalice. So it’s actually working for him and against him as he’s struggling through it.
At one point the treasure completely covers Harry and you think, ‘Has he been buried alive?’. But then he comes bursting through this massive amount of treasure, falling back towards Ron and Hermione and the goblins. Then Griphook steals the sword away from Harry and the kids are left behind to be buried alive again. Eventually the treasure pours out through the door of the vault. So in this scene everything on the floor and the mounds that start growing were basically CGI treasure that we put into the shot.
fxg: How did they shoot this scene – was there some practical treasure?
Jacobs: In the beginning of the sequence, there was some treasure lying around the base of Hermione and Harry. It helped create some of the atmospheric lighting effects because it caused the light to be reflecting back up on them. Then as we go further into the sequence, they had some pneumatic lifts with gold mylar over them to create light bounce. Harry was climbing up this pile, five to six feet off the ground on these lifts. In that wide shot of Harry struggling through the pile, in all those shots he was climbing up these lifts and then all the treasure was treasure we put in the shots.
We had a LIDAR scan of the set and models that were representativ
Green Lantern: Sony suits up
We talk to several members of the Sony Pictures Imageworks team responsible for bringing many of Green Lantern’s visual effects to the screen.
As principal vendor on Green Lantern, Imageworks delivered more than 1,000 shots for the film, which sees test pilot Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) before suddenly granted superpowers from a mysterious ring and finding himself among the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps. Despite the high shot count – made up of CG suits, CG characters, environments and the deadly Parallax creature – Imageworks’ visual effects had to fit into the real world inhabited by Hal Jordan, as envisaged by director Martin Campbell.
“Martin comes from a very physically-based filmmaking school,” says Imagewor
ks visual effects supervisor Jim Berney. “A lot of this film wasn’t just trying to get a spectacle out there on the screen. The thing Martin wanted was that it had to be physically-based and look real. That posed a challenge for us because for the Green Lantern – it’s all about his energy. It’s about green effects and his constructs and environment.”
CG suits and characters
Members of the Green Lantern Corps appear in luminescent and somewhat translucent suits. Imageworks created all of the suits as entirely computer generated effects, both for fully digital characters such as Kilowog and Tomar-Re and as body replacements for Hal Jordan, Sinestro and Abin Sur. The studio referred to concepts from production designer Grant Major and lead creature designer Neville Page for the character and suit looks, as well as previs from Pixel Liberation Front (PLF) for many of the shots in the film.
“In terms of the suit,” explains Berney, “the idea was that
when somebody puts this ring on and they become
a Lantern and it incorporates into them and changes their mythology. We see Ryan Reynolds in this suit and we see depth to it. We see the muscle movement and the outer layer sliding against this inner layer. It gave us this ability to have this energy that not only crawled on the outside of the surface but also coming from within.”
TRANSFORMERS Dark of the Moon: ILM’s magic, in 3D
Industrial Light & Magic visual effects supervisor Scott Farrar and digital production supervisor Nigel Sumner discuss key scenes from Transformers: Dark of the Moon, including Bumblebee catching Sam and the Chicago battle, as well as working in ste
reo.
reo.Catching Sam
Having delivered ground
breaking work on the first two Transformers films, ILM upped the ante in many areas of this third outing, from the complexity of the characters, the number of transformations, to the simulations, and then made it all work in stereo. No clearer is this evident than in the spectacular shot ‘SD160′. Here, a tumbling Bumblebee, who is evading Decepticons on the highway, ejects Sam from his front passeng
er seat to avoid a gas bottle truck. As the two heroes launch into the air, Bumblebee continues to knock objects out of the way and protect Sam, before grabbing his screaming friend at the las
t second and re-transforming into car-form and driving on.
Shooting for 3D
Dark of the Moon was shot partially with Cameron-Pace Group’s 3D Fusion camera rigs developed by James Cameron’s team for Avatar, and other film and camera systems. It was also partially post-converted. Scott Farrar, for one, embraced the detail and fidelity inherent in creating giant robots for stereo. “I did some tests with the robots,” he says, “where we were close-up on a robot – and you know Optimus Prime has 10,000 pieces – and if you get close-up you see all the details in the nooks and crannies of these pieces. It’s totally unlike a plain surface subject like a human head or an animated head. You see this detail and there’s truly not been a film that would not look as cool as what we’re doing right now.”
DNeg’s Gringott’s Dragon and Digi Hogwarts
fxg: So where did you start with modeling Hogwarts?Vickery: Ultimately we were tasked with building this asset that was essentially seven miles from one end to the other, with a com
pletely digital school in a completely pristine
state and a destroyed state. We weren’t sure how close we were going to get to any of it. But we had to prepare for it both in terms of the en
vironment and in building the asset. I think one of the cleverest things we did was that our lead environment artist – Piet
ro Ponti – was tasked with going to Scotland where they shot the mountains surrounding the school and capturing that data. He set up a three-camera rig, left, center and right. The cameras were all set up with remote trigger shutters. He went up in a helicopter and they would fly semi-circular flight paths around every
single mountain they needed to capture, at different heights.
Pietro plotted all these points out using Google Maps and Earth, so that before he went he was able to work out the best time of day depending on the time of year they were shooting, so that they got the best lighting for every mountain. The helicopter pilot was really great and also super-excited that Pietro had managed to do all of this GPS work. They just fed the co-ordinates into the helicopter nav system and just flew perfect positions all the way around the sides of thes
e mountains. It was an amazing little trick.
We got all of this information back at Double Negative, and used a piece of software called Photo-fit, which is a photogrammetry tool we used to re-create the mountains. Once we
had all the mountains, we worked closely with Stuart Craig, the production designer, and he created a collage of geome
try surrounding the school and we could put the mountains anywhere we wanted. The next tricky thing was actually just modeling the school. In the end we had a team of about 30 people working for two years building the school. It was fully pristine and brand new, but then also torn to pieces.
fxg: What about the detail on the stonework and Hogwarts building itself – where did reference for that come from?
Vickery: Real buildings. It was a combination of Stuart Craig’s amazing team which have literally done thousands of archite
ctural drawings of literally every single school building. You could re-create Hogwarts from these if you really, really wanted to. We had all these blueprints that went into the tiny details of each of the tiles of the gapping stones in the Great Hall, to the arched windows, and even profiles of hand rails that ran around the inside of the staircases. So that was the starting point, then Pietro and his team went to t
he actual filming locations that Stuart had used to design the school – Durham Cathedral, Edinburgh Castle, Winchester Cathedral and others – which we extensively photographed.
The actual physical textu
res were painted by hand, but when you look at real buildings you realize ther
e can be some really weird things going on in there. You’ll see there are even small trees growing out all over the place in the higher reaches of old cathedrals, coming out of old brickwork. And just the way that one face will be worn because that’s the predominant side the wind or sun is coming from, which fades things differently. And different buildings sag slightly too.
Stuart would come into Double Negative a number of times to review our work. His keen eye for detail was put to the test. He would scrutinize every little thing. We’d produce these renders that we thought were perfect – beautiful and photoreal renders that would match their courtyard perfectly. Stuart would look at it and go, ‘Ah, the mortar lines look a bit like they’re a bit too wide over there…’. And then when we started destroying the school, we started getting into what was inside the walls. He would say, ‘You can’t just break a wall and have three layers of bricks, because actually if they did that there would be a course of brick and then inside that there’d be a course of rubble, and behind it another course of brick.’ So we ended up getting a specification for how thick each wall around the school should be and what would be in the middle and on the outside. It was literally a masterclass in architecture.
fxg: When it did come time to destroy parts of Hogwarts, how did your model interact with some of Dneg’s destruction tools?
Vickery: Well we already have this great pipeline of tools, so that meant we could spend a lot of time doing the creative side of the work, rather than too much R&D, because it w
as already done. Essentially we took a fairly old-school approach to destroying Hogwarts – so if say a roof collapsed we would make 3,000 roof tiles and build the roof as a real object from Stuart Craig’s set plans, and then we would drop a canon ball on it or fire big forces at it and see what happens. Because we had built the entire school we could actually knock it down for real.
We’d also run these physical simulations on huge walls or rooftops or turrets and knocking them down and seeing what happened – that gave us a beautiful organic feel t
o the destruction as well. They would stop working somewhat if we needed to art direct the destruction, at which point we would go in and sculpt and model holes in the sides of walls. We also had areas of destruction that
had to match the real set, so we had to sometimes physically place planks of wood and beams and masonry detail, especially for the courtyard set.
fxg: How was the protective shield that goes over Hogwarts generated?
Vickery: Firstly, Tim Burke gave us a real free hand in the aesthetic and let us put some versions of that in front of him for ideas. So we had big creative input, and then that was taken on and driven by him. It also became a shared effort between 2D and 3D. Sometimes in visual effects, shots like this are driven by the 3D particle simulations, and then comp is doing the finishing touches. But in this instance, because it was such a creative concept, it came from a lot of different inputs.
Tanya Richard did a lot of concept work in the first instance, and then Alexander Seaman, our effects lead, put together some fantastic Houdini effects work, particles and cloth simulation and some straight-up texture painting. He handed it to 2D artist Christine Wong, who was a really creative compositor and defined the look of the shield in Nuke, also using a lot of the 3D tools in that software.
fxg: There was a lot of sharing of shots and assets between Soho vfx houses on this film, especially for Hogwarts. Can you talk about how the work moves between facilities?
Vickery: The amount of collaboration was pretty incredible. If I wanted something from MPC, I’d pick up the phone and ring Greg Butler, their VFX supe, and say, ‘Hey, are you working on this, can we have the stone knights?’ And he’d send that over in the afternoon. We weren’t really competing with each other, because when the work had been awarded, we all sat in the same room together. Tim Burke and Emma Norton (the overall VFX producer) would divide the work the way they thought best, and then let us sort out the details of interacting with each other. We’d have these meetings where we’d work out the easiest way to work on the shots and sometimes things shuffled back and forth between facilities.
Sometimes we’d do things like the backgrounds and they were relatively easy shots to share. It got more complicated sharing things with say MPC, who had done a lot of previs for the battle sequence. Their previs would be passed over to us to do the shots. Early on we shared our previs Hogwarts asset with them, and they built stone knights and viaduct elements that they gave to us. We also of course kept Tim and Emma and Warners in the loop.
fxg: Hogwarts was such a big part of this film – how did you plan out that work given that it would be such an enormous digital creation?
Vickery: It was definitely the biggest thing we had to do – we started working on it in summer 2008 and we were still working on Half-Blood Prince at that point. Tim Burke (the overall visual effects supervisor) and the director David Yates were very keen to see whether it was plausible to do a digital Hogwarts, to free them up in filmmaking terms. We went on set and photographed the miniature before it was deconstructed. Then we started doing tests to show the client that a CG believable Hogwarts would work in both wide shots, full close-ups and as set extensions. That was the easy part in a way. The difficult part was then taking that and creating an asset that could be used in the film. When we were building our asset, we still had no idea what any of the shots would be. They also didn’t really know at that stage how much set they would be building.
fxg: So where did you start with modeling Hogwarts?
Vickery: Ultimately we were tasked with building this asset that was essentially seven miles from one end to the other, with a completely digital school in a completely pristine state and a destroyed state. We weren’t sure how close we were going to get to any of it. But we had to prepare for it both in terms of the environment and in building the asset. I think one of the cleverest things we did was that our lead environment artist – Pietro Ponti – was tasked with going to Scotland where they shot the mountains surrounding the school and capturing that data. He set up a three-camera rig, left, center and right. The cameras were all set up with remote trigger shutters. He went up in a helicopter and they would fly semi-circular flight paths around every single mountain they needed to capture, at different heights.
Pietro plotted all these points out using Google Maps and Earth, so that before he went he was able to work out the best time of day depending on the time of year they were shooting, so that they got the best lighting for every mountain. The helicopter pilot was really great and also super-excited that Pietro had managed to do all of this GPS work. They just fed the co-ordinates into the helicopter nav system and just flew perfect positions all the way around the sides of these mountains. It was an amazing little trick.
We got all of this information back at Double Negative, and used a piece of software called Photo-fit, which is a photogrammetry tool we used to re-create the mountains. Once we had all the mountains, we worked closely with Stuart Craig, the production designer, and he created a collage of geometry surrounding the school and we could put the mountains anywhere we wanted. The next tricky thing was actually just modeling the school. In the end we had a team of about 30 people working for two years building the school. It was fully pristine and brand new, but then also torn to pieces.
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