The Orphanage
At this leading visual effects company, artists spend more time creating art, thanks to the high-end tools in Autodesk Maya and Autodesk 3ds Max software products.
At The Orphanage, technology takes a back seat to artistry. “I consider visual effects to be moving surrealism,” says Jonathan Harman, a CG supervisor at the company. “Just as Dali didn’t spend all his time thinking about how the chemicals were mixed to make the paint he used, we don’t want to spend all our time thinking about the software we’re using.” “If we’re using good software,” he adds, “our artists will spend less time thinking about the technology and they’ll spend more time being artists.” To achieve such artistic freedom, The Orphanage, a leading visual effects, production, and technology company based in San Francisco and Los Angeles, has integrated Autodesk® Maya® software and Autodesk® 3ds Max® software into every stage of its pipeline, from modeling to rigging to animation to rendering. “It’s about direct manipulation. We want our artists to drive the creative process directly and not have to move through layers of abstraction and complexity to achieve their creative visions,” says Dan McNamara, vice president of technology. “Maya and 3ds Max allow our artists to do that.” According to Harman, the artists have been achieving this goal with Maya and 3ds Max for several years, using Maya for modeling and creature work, and 3ds Max for shading, texturing, lighting, and rendering on projects ranging from feature films to television commercials to music videos. During that time, however, programmers at The Orphanage also had to bolster their production pipeline with proprietary tools designed to enable the software to interoperate. |
Now that both Maya and 3ds Max are part of the Autodesk Media and Entertainment portfolio, the artists are looking forward to smoother interoperability between the two powerhouse packages. “We used to feel that having Maya and 3ds Max in our pipeline was both a strength and a weakness—a strength because each package has very strong features that © Paramount Pictures, Aeon Flux. Image courtesy of The Orphanage. At this leading visual effects company, artists spend more time creating art, thanks to the high-end tools in Autodesk Maya and Autodesk 3ds Max software products. The Orphanage By Audrey Doyle complement each other and a weakness because getting data from one package to the other was an issue that required some heavy lifting on our part,” Harman says.
“Today, we’re using the FBX file format to transfer data between Maya and 3ds Max, and we’re looking forward to having even more synergy and interoperability between the two packages in the future,” he continues “This will turn what used to be a weakness into a very important strength.”
Over the years, artists at The Orphanage have relied on the varied and robust tools in Maya and 3ds Max to create stunning digital effects for a multitude of projects. Most recently, the company created effects for the movies Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Aeon Flux, and it is currently working on effects for The Host and Superman Returns. As the team explains, each of these projects has presented CG challenges that they have been able to overcome, thanks to certain features and capabilities in Maya and 3ds Max. In Harry Potter, for instance, one of the team’s responsibilities was to create effects for the scenes comprising Dumbledore’s pensieve. According to the story, a wizard can remove a thought from his mind and place it in a pensieve, which is a magical object that stores memories. This leaves the wizard with a clear, fresh mind to concentrate on more pressing matters.
At one point in the film, Harry falls into Dumbledore’s pensieve and ends up in one of the elder wizard’s memories of a trial that took place sometime before. The artists used Maya to model the environment—an elaborately detailed trial chamber measuring eight stories high and weighing in at 3 million polygons. “Maya is great when it comes to handling huge, very detailed and dense models like this one,” McNamara says. In addition to the size of the model, another challenge concerned rendering it, which they accomplished in the Brazil Rendering System in 3ds Max. For this task, the team found the Per-Pixel Camera Map plug-in to 3ds Max particularly helpful. The Orphanage artists developed the plug-in for their work on the film Hellboy, and Autodesk began packaging it with 3ds Max version 7.
As Kevin Baillie, associate visual effects supervisor on Harry Potter, explains the artists rendered the trial chamber environment via projection mapping, a technique that relies on the theory of matte painting from the camera’s perspective in that artists work on only what the camera will see. “It allowed us to take this environment whose look we had developed to a reasonable state, render out a few different views of it, and hand them to our matte painters, who painted on the frames all the details that would have been too difficult or would have taken too long to do in 3D,” he says.
Then the matte painters handed the views to the 3D team, who used the 3ds Max plug-in to project the paintings back onto the Maya geometry and render them through the 3D camera in 3ds Max. “As a result, when we flew the 3D camera through the trial chamber, it looked like we were moving through this beautifully artistic environment,” he adds. “With this tool, we made that environment really sing.”
The Per-Pixel Camera Map plug-in also played an important role in the artists’ work on Aeon Flux. According to Harman, who was a technical director on the film, one of the team’s more-challenging shots concerned the gigantic city of Bregna and the lush forests surrounding it, all of which they modeled in Maya and textured and rendered in 3ds Max and Brazil. “In this shot, we flew the equivalent of 50 miles through and over the CG forest, and then into the CG city,” he says.
In addition to adding a heightened sense of realism to the environment, the plug-in enabled the team to accommodate changes quickly and easily. “In a big shot like this, it was important for the director to be able to ask that the trees be greener or the walls on a building be mossier, for example, and for us to be able to make those changes quickly,” Harman says. “The matte painters just had to go in and paint the trees greener and paint more moss on the walls. We didn’t have to re-model anything.”
Another challenge on Aeon Flux that the Autodesk software helped the artists overcome concerned the metal spheres the title character used to escape from prison. Prior to her imprisonment, as Aeon Flux crept along a maze of hallways en route to her assassination attempt on another character in the film, she had released several drops of liquid from a ring. While she’s trapped in her cement cell, she whistles; the drops of liquid pop up off the floor and transform into metal spheres, which roll to her cell, assemble on an exterior wall, and explode, freeing her.
To handle the challenge of creating the spheres’ photorealistic reflective surfaces, the team turned to the image-based lighting tools in Brazil and 3ds Max. “We used high-dynamic-range images captured on set to light the spheres and create the reflections,” Baillie says. “If something has a bright highlight on it and it moves quickly, you want the motion blur to act properly when the object is moving—the highlight should streak and stay crisp and hot, and the rest of the object should get blurrier. We couldn’t have achieved this look on those metallic spheres if we didn’t use the image-based lighting technology in Brazil and 3ds Max to light the objects and map the reflections.”
As an aside, Harman and Baillie equate the complexity of the reflections in these shots with the work the team completed recently for a Sprint/BMW commercial called “The Build.” At one point in the commercial, as an actor reaches for the car’s door handle, you can see the reflection of his arm on the side of the door.
“For this commercial, we had to create some tricky blurry reflections to provide an extra level of photorealism,” recalls Harman. “The idea is that if you put your hand on a car and then take your hand away, as your arm moves away from the car its reflection becomes blurry but the reflection of your hand remains more in focus. With Brazil, we were able to get that extra level of photorealism; that blurry reflection.” Images courtesy of The Orphanage.
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