Mokko Studio Reaps Benefits of Toxik/Maya Workflow While Creating Effects Shots for Silent Hill
By Audrey Doyle
“It’s a match made in heaven.” That’s how Marc Rousseau describes the workflow afforded by Autodesk® Toxik™ and Autodesk® Maya® software. “You have the top compositing system working with the top 3D system,” he continues. “With Toxik and Maya in a film-based workflow, the possibilities are endless.”
Rousseau is the visual effects producer and general manager of Mokko Studio (http://www.mokkostudio.com), a Quebec-based production house that’s been using Autodesk® Combustion® desktop compositing software and Maya for film-based effects since it formed in 2003. Earlier this year, Mokko added Toxik to its compositing arsenal. And Rousseau says the artists liked what they saw.
“Toxik is the new guy on the block, but we could tell when we started using it that its collaborative features represented a new generation of compositing tools for film-based visual effects,” he says. “We decided we should take advantage of it right away.”
And they did, for their work on the film Silent Hill. Released in April, Silent Hill tells the story of a mother who, unable to accept a diagnosis that her daughter should be permanently institutionalized for psychiatric care, flees with the girl to the abandoned town of Silent Hill, in West Virginia. Her daughter soon goes missing, and as she searches for her, she uncovers the strange town’s history. According to Rousseau, the 15-person Mokko team handled three sequences composed of 50 effects shots. All of them comprised an eerie environment enveloped in a smothering fog, which Mokko helped design and then created with assistance from Toxik, Maya, and Combustion. As Rousseau explains, the film’s director, Christophe Gans, wanted this eerie environment to represent an “other world” of implied hidden danger. “Our sequences show the mother walking down the stairs, and another of her and a policewoman walking onto a road, in a dense fog, and it looks like the road suddenly ends,” Rousseau explains. “You’re in the middle of nowhere with her, with ashes falling from the sky. It is really quite breathtaking.” The artists received green screen footage of the actress; shots with the live-action ash; some CG ash shots created by another studio as reference; and a live-action shot of fog. To create the CG fog environment, the team used different techniques, depending on the shot. “For some shots we used particles and cloud tanks created in Maya, and for others we created matte paintings and deformed them in Combustion,” Rousseau explains. They also used Maya Fluids for smoke and fog effects. Then they composited the CG elements into the live-action shots using Toxik. According to Mokko, most final composite shots comprised more than 20 layers. The most stunning shot the team worked on was a fog shot that included a huge dilapidated building, which they created as a matte painting into which they incorporated Maya camera projections, 3D elements, and particles. In addition, they created a CG version of a Jeep® vehicle moving through the fog environment. “The film crew shot a Jeep against green screen, but they needed it to move farther than what they had shot,” Rousseau explains. “So we matched the camera movement, re-created the Jeep, and animated it moving through our CG world in Maya, then composited all the layers in Toxik.” |
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To create their own CG ashes the team relied on the Maya particle system, which enabled them to provide the organic but changing look Gans wanted. “We couldn’t apply just one recipe to all 50 shots, because, for example, the ashes landing on the stairs react differently based on how the wind catches them and how the actress moves past them,” Rousseau says. “So we redesigned the look from shot to shot, and made sure what we created matched the other ash elements.
“Maya was great for this, and for helping us to create the turbulence and determine the speed and weight of the ashes falling on the stairs,” he continues. “It’s the best solution available for creating particles.”
According to Rousseau, Toxik provided several important benefits on this project. Most important was its collaborative work environment, which enabled multiple artists to work on different aspects of the same shot simultaneously, with the assurance that everyone had immediate, up-to-date access to all the data. “So if one artist finished his roto, for example, that work updated in the other artists’ workspaces, which meant everyone always had access to the most up-to-date work,” he says. “We had only two months to do this, and this saved us a lot of time. Toxik takes the confusion out of making sure everyone is working on the latest version of a shot, which is crucial for film work.”
Mokko’s lead compositor and VFX supervisor, Alain Lachance, also appreciated the collaborative work environment of Toxik. “In addition,” he notes, “since Toxik works in floating point, it gave us the opportunity to work with the maximum quality [possible], which was especially useful with the shots that had fog.”
All told, Rousseau says Mokko is pleased with the results they achieved using Maya and Toxik as the backbone of their pipeline on Silent Hill. “We’ve only just begun using Toxik, and we look forward to using it on more film projects,” he concludes. “The benefits of a Toxik/Maya workflow are exactly what we need.”