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The Orphanage's Nathan Fariss on 'Aeon Flux'
Date: Dec 14, 2005
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Nathan Fariss talks to vfxblog about his work as lead technical director for The Orphanage on Aeon Flux.
Interview by Ian Failes
Can you give me an overview of The Orphanage's work for Aeon Flux?
 The Orphanage was responsible for two sequences: One with the exploding homing Orbs and one featuring an encounter between Aeon and some soldiers in a monorail station. We also had two big pull-back shots, each of which started in the city of Bregna, one ending above the surrounding jungle and the other ending in a museum, revealing that the pull-back was of a model.
What was involved in the monorail shots? Were you able to look to any particular reference or pre-viz?
One of the main challenges we encountered with the monorail look-dev was avoiding the miniature look, as we found that there really isn't any reference for pieces of bone that large. Since most of the readily-available bone reference is stuff like dinosaur skulls in museums and cow skulls in the desert, we used those as a starting point. We found that blending large- and small-scale noise with painted texture maps, all used as bump-mapping, gave us a convincing organic surface. We then added textures painted from bone photos, a bit of sub-surface scattering, and some glancing-angle blurry reflections to get a look that we were happy with. As far as reference and pre-viz goes, we had a few concept paintings of the monorail and our matte painters worked up concept art for the big city pull-back shots.
What software/hardware solution did you use for the monorail and city shots?
We used Autodesk's 3dsMax and Splutterfish's Brazil for the orb and monorail sequences for the 3d side and Adobe After Effects for the compositing side. Alias's Maya was used for some of the modeling on the city shots and Adobe Photoshop was used for the matte painting and texture work. Hardware-wise, our workstations and rendering machines are all BOXX workstations.
How were the monorail shots incorporated into the live action plates?
We built a replica of the monorail station based on the set blueprints and on-set reference photos. Having this digital set gave us the latitude to use it for both tunnel extension, as the set just had large green cards where the tunnels would have been, and for interactive lighting, reflection and shadow passes. Once the plates were matchmoved, we projected a few matte paintings in for the tunnel extensions and worked to match the set lighting on the monorail. One of the challenges we encountered was reconciling the practical interactive lighting with the approved animation of the monorail.
The plates had been shot with lights flashing down on the monorail track to simulate the monorail passing over the illuminated track. It turned out that the timing on the practical lighting did not match the timing of the approved animation, so we had to improvise a bit. We took a dark frame, when the lights were at their lowest, a bright frame, when the lights were their brightest, and used a lighting pass we generated to blend between the two, making our digital lighting look like the practical lighting. We also had to add digital bullet hits on the monorail and surrounding station as the soldiers fired on the monorail. This was accomplished using pFlow in 3dsMax and broken up into a number of different passes, so we could control a lot of the elements in the comp. This allowed us to easily change things like spark brightness and the thickness of dust and smoke without having to re-render any 3d elements.
What made up your city of Bregna?
To put it simply: a very large 3d model, a small area of textured, lit and rendered 3d, and a lot of matte paintings.
How did you accomplish the homing device Orbs?
Much of the orb animation was done by hand, controlled by splines and adjusted by just scooting some key frames around a bit. The challenge in this sequence came from the two shots of the orbs first stacking up and then leaping into the air and causing the wall to explode toward camera. The issue at hand was that we needed roughly 100 orbs to be stacking and piling up against the wall, but if we animated them all by hand, then any animation revisions would be extremely time-consuming. To solve this, I wrote a little script that animated the spheres for us, causing them to hit a few key positions, with an element of randomness, and then leap into position on the wall. This allowed us to tweak the animation by changing a few pieces of reference geometry, some timing parameters and the target positions, effectively taking our animation revision time from hours to minutes. As far as rendering and lighting goes, we had some great look-dev done by our TDs to give a bit of an iridescence to the orbs, which really shows up in the close-up shots in the tunnel.
Can you talk about the design of the powers of 10 shots for Bregna? Were these previsualized?
The design and pre-viz processes went hand-in-hand for these shots. For the shot that ends in the museum, we had a beginning plate and an end plate, but the in between camera-move through the city was developed though a series of animation takes. We would show them to the client, and based on their feedback, we arrived at a final camera-move. The pull-back shot that ends above the jungle was based on a series of concept art paintings that our matte painters did as well as some pre-viz that we received from the client. The camera move was then developed such that we began in the jungle and ended high above the ground at the point that was shown in the concept paintings.
What made you decide to go with matte paintings rather than CG? What challenges did that bring? What kind of tools did you use for the paintings and the geometry?
One must realize that we used a hybridized approach rather then just matte paintings or just 3d. We find that matte painters have an eye for realism and artistry that just “feels right� that is nearly impossible to achieve from CG alone. They are able to tailor an image to a specific view and piece together elements from reality that make the outcome that much more believable. Our workflow usually consists of building up the geometry of the world, in this case the high-res city of Bregna, doing rough texture work, doing digital lighting and then rendering out diffuse stills from a number of different camera angles. These high-res stills are then handed to a matte painter, who then adds much of the extra detail that, were it done entirely with CG, would be far too time-consuming to add in 3d and ultimately, not as true to life. Once the matte paintings look great, they are re-projected back onto the original 3d geometry, using the cameras that generated the initial stills. Then our shot camera moves through the scene, rendering a true 3d view of everything, but with all the beauty and detail of a matte painting, with a lighting-fast render time.
We combine this matte painting pass with reflection passes and a few matte passes (for color tweaks on the comp side) and you end up with giant shot that took a lot less time and resources to produce then a fully-3d shot and that includes the detail and nuance that a matte painter is uniquely able to produce.
The challenges for this type of shot, as we have encountered on a few other shows as well, are almost always of the resource-management type. Keeping track of a lot of matte paintings and making sure that they are the correct resolution for how they will be seen by the camera is always a trying task. Although, since we have done similar shots on other shows, it was not a task with which we were unfamiliar.
Did you have to match any of the other vendors' work, or use any of their assets?
We did get a low-res Bregna model from another vendor, which we used as a layout guide when making our own high-res model. We also had to match the work of the practical effects people, as there were practical sparks and squib hits in other sequences that we needed to match in the monorail sequence.
Related Links
The Orphanage
Aeon Flux Official Site
Special thanks to Nathan Fariss for talking to vfxblog, and to Rama Dunayevich for making it possible. All images copyright 2005 Paramount Pictures. Courtesy of The Orphanage. All rights reserved.
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