Artist Spotlight: Uncharted Territory

Uncharted Territory, LLC is a Los Angeles-based production company co-founded in 1999 by Oscar-winning Visual Effects Supervisor Volker Engel and Visual Effects Producer Marc Weigert. Dreamscape Imagery, the visual effects arm of the company, has been using the SplutterFish's Brazil r/s to meet the rendering challenges of the recently-released feature film blockbuster “The Day After Tomorrow” (DAT) and the production company’s current project, “Kingdom in Twilight” (KIT).

At the ‘VES 2004 – Festival of Visual Effects’ that took place in San Rafael, California (June 18 – 20), SplutterFish engaged in an informal roundtable conversation with Dreamscape 3D veterans Brandon Davis, Adam Watkins and John Chalfant to elicit their comments on the impact of Brazil r/’s on the rendering process.

SP: What are the overall rendering system features that are important to the film visualization work that is being done at UT?

Brandon Davis (BD): First and foremost, a renderer needs to be reliable. Bells and whistles are nice, but not at the expense of reliability. Brazil is so rock solid, I would venture to say that it is some of the best software I've worked with...ever. 

SP: When was Brazil r/s integrated into the production pipeline at Uncharted Territory?

BD: We had initially evaluated Brazil towards the end of our work on “Coronado.” Brazil has features that filled in gaps that we had experienced using the 3ds max scanline renderer and SplutterFish was very generous in letting us evaluate the software and put it "through the wringer" so to speak. The catalyst for actually bringing Brazil into the pipeline at UT began in the Summer of 2003, when the planning and development phase of our current project “Kingdom in Twilight” first began. Looking at the scale of the work we had to accomplish and the types of shots we were scheduled to do, we felt that Brazil’s features and reliability would meet our demands for an advanced renderer that would let us deal with much larger and more complex scenes as well as provide us with more advanced tools for lighting and shading.

Marc Weigert & Volker Engel

Brazil has been a huge success here and our level of commitment to it has increased as production has grown. Initially we thought we would reserve it for areas where it excelled over the scanline renderer, but as we started working it became obvious that every artist on the team wanted to use Brazil for various reasons - the lighting tools, the shaders, the quality of anti-aliasing, etc. So, we grew our pool of licenses accordingly.

Adam Watkins (AW): A renderer is one of the most significant tools in any production pipeline and with Brazil we haven’t hit any problems.  It’s like the last thing we need to worry about – one major headache out of the way. Another benefit to using Brazil is that it doesn’t require a whole technical crew to support it. It keeps the rendering process in the hands of the artists. With Brazil an artist can sit down and “bam,” “bam,” “bam,” go through iterations very quickly.  SplutterFish has put a more useful and better tool at our disposal.

SF: How does Brazil r/s fit into the production pipeline at UT?

BD: We’ve actually built the entire 3D pipeline around Brazil. So, Brazil is incorporated into nearly all stages of 3D production here. While we have some bonafide Brazil experts here, it’s also nice to know that new artists can get the hang of the software quite quickly.  

AW:  More specifically, we are using Brazil with 3ds max for 3D work. For compositing we use Adobe After Effects and Andersson Technologies’ Synth Eyes for motion tracking.

SF: Tell us how Brazil r/s stands up to the overall rendering challenges of UT’s film projects?

BD:  With respect to production workflow, you can totally tell that Brazil was designed by artists and folks involved in production because the way it works is so straight forward and artist friendly. It adds a level of control that we just previously didn’t have in our toolset.

AW: I have been using Brazil since just before its pre-release days.  I evaluated other options out there but none of them could compete with Brazil’s ease of use, speed and rock solid stability. Yes, the software has definitely been designed with realities of production in mind.

John Chalfant (JC): I got my first glimpse of Brazil last summer when I was working in the Cinematics Department at Blizzard Entertainment when they were first starting to test its skin shader. At the time I was working on modeling and texturing realistic humans for one of their games which required that I paint these very big diffuse, spec, and bump maps for each character.  Although there were a few ‘tricks’ I was able to use in max’s material editor to get an interesting “organic” look for each texture, which sort of worked, I was unable to get the realistic look needed. Afterwards I saw a few of the Brazil renders that were done on the same texture maps that I had been rendering with the scanline render. The result was a night and day difference. Brazil took what I had started that last ten percent pushing it over the top.

Day After Tomorrow: Station Weather Effects

BD: I think for those artists who have never used max before they are always blown away by Brazil’s lighting and shader tools. Brazil’s skylight feature is ‘huge’ and scary fast compared to other renderers. I’ve been doing CG for quite awhile and doing outdoor lighting is always difficult because you have the directional light source from the sun and then you also have light coming in from all over from the sky. What SplutterFish has done is made a really simple tool that is artist friendly, fast and controllable where you can add that ambient light.

AW: To try and mimic a skylight or natural environment is exceptionally difficult and can easily take a day to do by hand. I find that using Brazil we can create something in an hour or so and get it to perfectly match the existing footage. And then there are the artistic controls in Brazil that allow you to tweak levels of brightness and contrast, which you can adjust very quickly so you can save time when you are rendering and achieve a really high quality render that is sensational.

BD: I also think that Brazil’s global illumination features standout in large part because of its ray acceleration controls. Brazil doesn’t reach a theoretical polygon limit the way the default renderer does that is quite annoying and could cause max to crash.  Brazil just chomps through polygons like it’s nothing. There are many global illumination controls in Brazil including photon mapping and quasi-monte carlo (technique for bouncing light around), all which offer a lot of flexibility for making changes. It also allows you to do things like trade off memory for speed, which is a huge asset.

AW: With other renderers I find that when you hit a problem you have to stop work and go searching for some sort of solution. In Brazil, the tools are all there to help you get past them and move on. Brazil’s adaptive anitaliasing, for example, allows you to turn down all your antialiasting settings so you can basically do a quick snap render, check your lighting set up, make adjustments and go through many iterations quickly. This speeds up production workflow so you don’t have to sit around and wait for things to happen.
 
BD: In the max default renderer the antialiasing setting is either on or off, that’s basically it.  Whereas in Brazil you have many parameters to choose from. Being adaptive you can under sample everything to get a snap shot of what the image looks like. In fact, when John first came to work on KIT last year, he knew all the ins and outs of the default scanline renderer. And, I remember saying “trust me” using Brazil your bump maps are going to look so much better because the image sampler and the anti-aliasing is so much better.

JC: Now, that I’m using Brazil daily at Uncharted I am floored by what you are able to do with it. In my experience Brazil is one of the most stable tools I’ve ever used with max. Using Brazil I’ve never had a crash and for any 3D application, that is saying a lot!

Day After Tomorrow: Refugee Crossing Before & After

SF: Let’s talk about Dreamscape’s use of Brazil r/s on “The Day After Tomorrow.” It is understood that Dreamscape was onboard to create two dozen visual effects shots, and ten additional CG elements including weather elements like advancing frost, snow and ice as well as digital extras and set extensions.  Can you walk us through a few of the rendering challenges you faced and the role Brazil r/s played?

BD: In general, Brazil’s superior anti-aliasing and ability to work in excess of 7 million polygons was critical to meet the technical challenges on this film. Brazil’s lighting tools, particularly the skylight and area lighting made working on outdoor shots much easier.

AW:  Dreamscape was initially requested to do a couple of compositing shots and the work blossomed out into a lot, lot more! In a major sequence that takes place at the New York Public Library in Manhattan we used Brazil to render photorealistic frost that forms across the interior surfaces of the building. Brazil’s adaptive anti-aliasing was critical in allowing us to maintain fine details of ice growing on the surfaces, while its render pass control allowed us to quickly provide additional rendering elements as requested from the compositors such as specular passes, luma shadow passes, and more.

In addition to weather elements, in another major scene we had about a week and a half to create a shot of American refugees crossing the Rio Grande River border from the United States to seek asylum in Mexico. Initially we created a library of around 50 CG people that we could use to populate the scene. I wrote some max script tools that let us generate variations of these people, different colored clothes, different hats, luggage, and so on, giving us an unlimited cast of extras to pick from. We randomly picked a number of these to populate the scene, and used them to fill in the gaps in the real crowd that was originally shot on location. The lighting in this scene was straightforward. Using the Brazil skylight and a single keylight with the “Affect Surfaces - Transition Curve” function, it was a cinch to dial-in exactly how sunlight was illuminating and shadowing other surfaces in the scene to create the soft twilight mood required by the director. The effort took only a couple of hours and was right the first time.

Day After Tomorrow: Refugee Camp Before & After

There was also a Refugee Camp shot that required us to add thousands of vehicles, helicopters, tents, people and other elements to the scene.  Brandon developed a system using Particle Flow, that let us control the placement of thousands of cars, RV’s and other vehicles onto the landscape. We then lit and rendered the shot using Brazil, which got through it effortlessly.

In addition, for the first “Day After Tomorrow” movie trailer, we had approximately three weeks to create a convincing picture of the Manhattan landscape in the grip of a deep freeze. We received the base geometry for the scene from another vendor and it was simply massive – 5 million polys, etc. The Director then requested that we add snow elements over the entire model, to make it look like it had just been blasted by the largest snow-storm ever, adding yet millions more polys to the scene. It was an absolute bear of a shot. Despite breaking the scene into different layers there were still large ice and snow elements that were multi-million polys in size which made it impossible to render these with the standard max scanline. Brazil was the only tool we could use to render these scenes. Brazil let us quickly render multiple iterations of  this geometry to get feedback when needed, while giving us superb control over the most subtle aspects needed to make the shot appear photoreal – lighting, materials, and anti-aliasing – to bring out the tiniest details of ice and Brandon’s particle snow elements.  I love the amount of control I have over Brazil’s anti-aliasing, and global illumination and how it lets me balance quality versus time to render.

Kingdom in Twilight: Digital Crowd Shots

SF: Let’s turn now to the visual effects Dreamscape is creating for “Kingdom in Twilight.” Can you provide us with a thumbnail sketch of Brazil’s role in meeting the day-to-day rendering challenges of the film?

BD: This film is a period piece that involves many rendering challenges. Dreamscape is involved with the creation of many, many CG environments and set extensions including castles, caves, snow, water and ice elements, army crowd simulations and complex character development including the creation of a large dragon creature that appears in approximately 150 shots. Critical to rendering is the handling of multi-million polygon counts, environmental lighting, and subsurface scattering.

AW:  There are also some quite complex “digital-crowd” requirements for this project. To effectively portray huge armies of soldiers standing up against each other in battle is in and of itself already a challenge, which is compounded here by the enormous polygon requirements. Because each of the people in the scenes, plus weapons, armor and accessories amount to more than 2,000-plus polygons, when you multiply this by say a thousand you easily reach 5 million polygons just to create a small portion of the crowd. Brazil’s capability in handling the large amounts of geometry and polygons in these scenes is just superb, one less thing for us to worry about.

BD: Brazil also handles mass instancing of objects for crowd duplication very well, which helps us efficiently save on computer memory.

JC: There is just a massive amount of visual effects work involved in the film (over 650 vfx shots) and we have a small team of only about five 3D artists to pull it off. In a dragon fight sequence that I’ve been working on, which takes place in a large underground cave, the production team built a small portion of the set out of foam rocks, everything else was blue screened. This turned each shot into an effects shot, so we either had to add a CG set extension or drop in a CG character.  After the 3D elements were generated we had to break each element out into different passes for compositing. At this point I found using Brazil’s render pass controls to be an invaluable asset for this process. It allowed us to create rendered layers for composting almost as fast as we could click the render button, which in the end really shaved days off of set up time on an already impacted schedule.

‘Kingdom of Twilight,’ directed by Uli Edel, is being co-produced by Uncharted Territory in the U.S. and Tandem Communications and VIP Medienfonds in Germany. The fantasy adventure is based on the classic Germanic myth “Das Nibelungenlied” and the Nordic “Volsunga Saga,” — the original story of Siegfried the dragon slayer which takes place somewhere between the Dark Ages and the earliest medieval period —  which also inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” and Richard Wagner’s epic opera cycle, “The Ring of the Nibelung.” The film is tentatively scheduled for release in the U.S. at the end of 2004.

SF: Are there any ‘smart’ rendering techniques you are using on KIT that you can share with us?

BD: We are always trying to use every trick in the book to speed up render times. I find if you do a really intense render with controls like global illumination, it can get really slow. And, if you’ve got several hundred frames to complete and nothing is moving other than the camera we find it is actually a good technique to do a couple of high quality resolution frames, paint in all your extra detail, and then camera map it back on. Then your render times become insignificant.

Kingdom in Twilight: CG Dragon

AW: It’s a really handy kind of shortcut for adding detail after the fact without having to go through massive render times. However, it’s the type of thing you can only use in certain circumstances. We’re using this technique to create castles that need to be placed in a very natural environment. Once we’ve built the 3D models of the castles, we then have a matte painter who will paint-in added elements such as snow.
 
SF: How is Brazil meeting overall expectations on the KIT?

AW: Brazil is performing great and more importantly looking great!  We have not encountered any big problems and any minor things have been has taken care of immediately by the awesome SplutterFish support team.

SF: Can you comment on SplutterFish’s level of customer support for Brazil r/s?

BD:  The SplutterFish development team and test crew provide some of the best product support I've ever received. Instead of dealing with a faceless corporation that reroutes you to tech support somewhere on the other side of the world, SplutterFish make themselves very accessible.  If we have a problem, we can post on the client webboard and get a quick response. If that’s not enough we can also email support directly.  But the fastest and most useful support comes in the form of their online support.  I can get an answer to a problem in minutes by logging in and chatting with a developer or crew member. Though unorthodox, it’s support that is hard to beat, and very practical.