Artist Spotlight: The Orphanage

Orphanage LogoApril 26, 2004 - Venice, CA: -- The Orphanage, based in San Francisco, was founded in 1999 by three visual effects veterans from Industrial Light + Magic. The facility provides high-end visual effects services for features, television and advertising; original digital motion picture and television production, and digital filmmaking technology development and licensing.

During the past three years The Orphanage has worked on visual effects jobs both large and small, ranging from independent films to blockbusters. The studio recently completed effects for the current visual effects heavy, “Hellboy,” based on the Dark Horse comic book by Mike Mignola, and directed by Guillermo del Toro. The Sony Pictures release tells the story of a demon conjured up from the spirit world by the Nazis for nefarious purposes, that is then recruited by the Americans to fight evil instead. The Orphanage’s other film credits include “50 First Dates," “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle,” "Anger Management," “Jeepers Creepers 2,” and“Spy Kids 3D.”

The Orphanage has recently committed to using Brazil r/s as its primary rendering solution for hard surface and environment work. SplutterFish caught up with Kevin Baillie, CG lead supervisor, at The Orphanage to talk about how Brazil r/s is being used in production.

SplutterFish: Can you tell us how you got your start in the CG effects business?

"West Side Highway" sequence
Digital cars behind Hellboy

Kevin Baillie: I got my start in visual effects while attending high school in Seattle, Washington. Following internships with a number of small companies and a job at Microsoft, at the age of 18, I was lucky enough to land a position with Lucasfilm’s JAK Films division. During my two years at the Skywalker Ranch, I worked on both pre-visualization (a.k.a. animatics) and final composites for “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace” – an amazing experience. Following that, I helped to create effects for a number of commercials, and was the visual effects sequence supervisor on Fox’s “Titan A.E.” In early 2000, I was one of the first employees to join The Orphanage and have worked here ever since where I have held CG supervising positions on “Jeepers Creepers 2,” “Anger Management,” “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle,” "and our most recent project, “Hellboy.”

SF: What influenced The Orphanage's decision to deploy Brazil r/s, and how does it fit into your production pipeline?

KB: Brazil’s advanced lighting features such as global illumination and photon mapping, in combination with its efficient raytracing and excellent standard shader library, initially drew us to Brazil r/s. While Brazil r/s can output amazing images directly from the renderer, it also offers great flexibility by supporting the output of multiple passes for each aspect of a frame:diffuse, reflection, andshadow.Thisfeatureallows us to fine tune ourimages very precisely insideour main compositing tool,Adobe After Effects.Such malleabilityenables us toreact very quickly to client changes, while also affording us greater creative control.

Currently, our visual effects productions average between 30-70 artists, all running off of Windows workstations built by BOXX Technologies. Our render farm utilizes large numbers of 1U Render BOXX machines sporting dual Pentium Xeon processors. Brazil is primarily in use at the moment by the hard surface and environment rendering divisions, and they really couldn’t be having more fun with it!

During “Hellboy”, under the direction of Shadi Almassizadeh, sequence supervisor, we recently experimented with running character shots through the Brazil pipeline, and the finished results looked fantastic! The "Ogdru Jahad" sequence at the end of the film is real evidence of the future promise for rendering creatures in Brazil. This necessitated that we create custom tools and processes to port character animation from our primary animation package, Maya, to 3ds max. With every show that we do, that development process takes a leap forward and is coming along very nicely.

*SF: *What rendering system features are important and/or unique to The Orphanage's film, commercial, and music video visual effects work?

"Bridge" sequence Actor on Brazil-
rendered digital matte painting

KB: The Orphanage producessuch a diverse range of effects work – from space ships, to explosions, to flying monsters, to set extensions – andspeed and flexibility are always of major concern. Good texture sampling and anti-aliasing are also extremely important – both areas in which Brazil r/s shines. Another attractive aspect of working with SplutterFish is its promising outline of the direction the product is headed. They’ve already expanded greatly on the capabilities and flexibility of 3ds max, and we anticipate that future products will be even more flexible and large-scale production friendly. The company’s development roadmap and mission statements definitely give us reassurance that the best is yet to come, and that Brazil r/s will continue to grow with the demands of this extremely competitive industry.

SF: Can you tell us about the general rendering needs The Orphanage faced on “Hellboy," and how Brazil r/s helped to address them?

KB: We used Brazil throughout Hellboy, from the creation of digital six packs of beer, to Hellboy tails, to giant flying squids. There’s a sequence called ‘West Side Highway’ where Hellboy chases Sammael, a monster that just doesn’t want to die, across an urban highway at night. For safety reasons, the production didn’t want to shoot the actors with real cars zooming by inches from them. Thus, another team of artists led by Shadi Almassizadeh had to add completely believable digital cars to almost every shot in the sequence. The models were lit with the help of an HDR environment light and reflection map, and rendered out using Brazil r/s. The difference between those cars and the ones shot on set was unnoticeable.

"Bridge" sequence Brazil-rendered
digital matte painting

The “Bridge” sequence in “Hellboy”also made extensive and creative use of Brazil. This sequence takes place in a cavernous underground crypt. The environment, while large and beautifully detailed, was lit by only a few shafts of overhead light. In that the source of light for most of the environment came from indirect “bounced” light. Ryan Tudhope, sequence supervisor, decided that Brazil’s global illumination features would meet the inherent rendering challenges. Using the Brazil API, we developed a 5 million-plus polygon environment which was modeled and roughly textured with a mix of texture maps and custom procedural shaders. Each shot was set up, lit, and rendered as a still frame using Brazil’s built-in distributed net render functionality, which made turnaround times, even with such large scenes, very reasonable. After the render was finished, it was handed over to our Matte Painting department, which used the Brazil renders as a starting point in which to paint shot-specific details such as grime, frayed ropes, crumbled rock, etc, to generally enhance the atmosphere of the shots.

Throughout the film’s post production, the “Hellboy” team continued to marvel at how close the raw Brazil lit renders got us towards the finished matte painting. After the paintings were finished, they were projected back onto the shot geometry in 3ds max as fully luminant textures, sometimes in multiple layers. The scene was then rendered with a moving camera to match what was shot on set. The results were just astounding!

SF: Can you share any particularly difficult or interesting rendering challenges that The Orphanage had to overcome on the "Hellboy" sequences?

KB: One of the effects in Hellboy that ‘freaked us out’ when the director asked for it had to do with an exploding crystal. Not just an exploding crystal, actually, but an internally illuminated, shattering, glyph-riddled, ‘God of Chaos’ filled crystal in space.

"Ogdru Jahad crystal" sequence: full-frame
creature animation and crystal shading

This shot posed numerous challenges from ray traced shadows and reflections to refractive crystal surfaces to full frame creature animation. Brazil’s fully featured shader library allowed us to use combinations of multiple shaders, most notably the wax shader for sub surface scattering effects, so that we were able to achieve exactly the look that the director was seeking. Brazil ‘cranked’ through it all in very reasonable (for the task at hand) render times with stunning render quality.

The cars in the aforementioned “West Side Highway” sequence also made use of Brazil to meet the technical challenge by enabling us to pull off realistic night time lighting in a very unique environment. To light the shot, we started out with a chrome sphere shot on set, which, when “unwrapped,” gave us an accurate representation of the surrounding environment at the time of the shoot. We were able to manipulate the Cineon frame into a high dynamic range image, which also allowed us to take advantage of the overbright information in the image. That was the crucial part of making the shots believable. We used the HDR image not only to light the shots, but also as a reflection source, preventing us from having to use specular highlights in any of our renders. Specular highlights serve as a great cheat in some situations, but in the end they don’t do a great job of representing what they truly supposed to be – reflections of “over bright” objects and light sources. What we ended up with were believably lit and reflective cars, complete with all of the proper “tubular” streaking of highlights in fast moving vehicles. This would have been very difficult to achieve without the technology that modern renderers such as Brazil provide.

SF: Do you have any final comments regarding your experience with Brazil r/s?

KB: What really inspired us to put Brazil r/s into production on feature films is SplutterFish’s outspoken and steadfast commitment to creating software that meets the needs of mission-critical productions like ours. Due to their extensive experience in the visual effects industry, they understand what it takes to get the job done on schedule, with the highest quality standards.

In our experience, the Brazil r/s renderer simply makes creating great looking shots much more fun. Brazil begs and teases you to do things you’ve never been able to do before. While some of those things are not without their speed hits, they often inspire new ideas, leading to groundbreaking, innovative and unique looks for the environments we create. We feel that the current version of Brazil r/s, and the future releases to come, in a sense, liberate us – helping us to put artistry into the images that we create. After all, the artistry is what it all comes down to in the end, isn’t it?