Fantastic User Story on Intelligent Creatures

[Anonymous]

Nuke Hits The Blot On Watchmen At Intelligent Creatures

Anyone who has seen Watchmen, director Zack Snyder’s 2009 big screen adaptation for
Warner Bros. of the 1980’s eponymous comic book series, cannot fail to be utterly
transfixed by the shape-shifting inkblot on the mask of vigilante Rorschach.

These subtle but stunning effects, which express his changing emotions through the
dramatic story, prompt genuine ‘How did they do that?’ reactions. The answers were
provided by Nuke in the more than capable hands of the visual effects team at
Intelligent Creatures in Toronto, Canada, which delivered over 320 shots for the film.

With fully-integrated 2D and 3D compositing and animation pipelines, and a wealth of
on-set experience, Intelligent Creatures is among the industry’s most progressive VFX
creators. As a self-styled, artist-driven visual effects house, the company relentlessly
pursues its mission to be a world-leading provider of visual effects, and to play a strong
supporting role in high-end, creatively-driven feature films – of which the $180m
grossing Watchmen is a prime example.

The current owners and co-founders, Michael Hatton and Lon Molnar, met while working
in the visual effects industry in Toronto, both of them holding senior positions, covering
all aspects of visual effects production: visual effects supervision, digital compositing,
3D animation and production management. They flung open the company’s doors in
2003, and since then Intelligent Creatures has attracted such clients as Warner Bros.,
Miramax Films, MGM, New Line Cinemas, and Twentieth Century Fox.

The company’s dedication to collaborating with some of cinema’s finest directors to help
them tell compelling stories has resulted in a list of VFX credits that includes Doug
Litman’s Mr & Mrs. Smith, Marc Forster’s Stranger Than Fiction, Alejandro González
Iñárritu’s Babel, Joel Schumacher’s Number 23, and Patrick Tatopoulos ‘ Underworld III:
Rise of The Lycans.

“When it comes to seamless live-action visual effects and creative design, we aim to
continually raise the bar, and Nuke is pivotal in helping us in our efforts,” says
Intelligent Creatures’ CTO and VFX supervisor Michael Hatton. The company switched to
Nuke in 2008.

“Nuke was a direct drop-in replacement for what we were using before. It is used by
lighters and compositors for virtually every compositing-related task here. During all of
the projects we have thrown at Nuke, it has proven extremely stable across multiple
platforms – Linux being most important to us, followed by Mac. It has integrated easily
into our pipeline and offers really good customising ability using scripting languages
we’re already familiar with.”

Almost all artists at Intelligent Creatures use Nuke on Linux workstations running 64-bit
openSUSE 11. Currently, Nuke runs on two workstation models – IBM Intellistation Z
Pros with Dual Xeon 5160 CPUs, 6Gb of RAM and NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500 cards, and
on HP xw8500s, with Core 2 Quad CPUs, 4Gb RAM and NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700s. It
also runs on several 8-core Mac Pro workstations for matte painters who might
occasionally need to pull things up in Nuke.

“We use Gigabit ethernet with jumbo frames everywhere between workstations and
production storage,” explains Jeff Klug, the company’s senior systems administrator.
“All production data is hosted on a cluster of Isilon nodes serving NFS to the
workstations. Clustered storage allows us to distribute the I/O in a way that has
significantly increased our maximum overall data throughput capability, with ease of
scalability.”

“Obviously, in post production we always want everything to be faster,” adds Klug. “That
being said, we’ve been very happy with Nuke’s performance as compared to other
software. Artists who are more familiar with other software are often surprised by how
quickly their renders complete.”

So when Intelligent Creatures was given the responsibility of creating the dynamic and
continuously changing inkblots on that mask that conceals the face of Watchmen’s sci-
fi, neo-noir superhero Rorschach, the company was well-tooled.

© 2009 Warner Bros. Images courtesy of Intelligent Creatures.
“The on-screen performance was all about what happens on Rorschach’s mask, so we
needed the inkblots to feel alive, to translate his feelings of anger, fear or calm,”
explains Greg Astles, 2D supervisor. “But having everything reacting to the light,
achieving correct depth-of-field and convincing fabric, were also vital elements to
creating a believable performance. Nuke came into its own on this film.”

The work started with hard-edged 2D animated inkblots being imported into Nuke. To
make them boil and seethe, these were blurred and combined with clips of animated
fractal noise generated in Nuke. The results were then retimed to reflect the action,
camera work and editorial pacing, and then colour-corrected in Nuke, delivering what
Astles describes as “organic and liquid-like” effects.

But making these Nuke-treated 2D blots appear to be truly moving through the fabric,
rather than just animating over the top, required another stage. Nuke was used to
render out separate layers of each treated blot – created as R & G channels – giving a
primary layer for the darker areas, and a secondary layer for the lighter ones. These
were exported to Houdini and wrapped around a 3D animated model of the mask. The
results were then fed back into Nuke as EXR files, where the separate channels could be
further colour-corrected as required, shot-to-shot and scene-to-scene.

© 2009 Warner Bros. Images courtesy of Intelligent Creatures.

© 2009 Warner Bros. Images courtesy of Intelligent Creatures.

“Nuke handles EXRs exceptionally well,” says Astles. “The big the advantage is that all
artists can see all the different layers in a convenient drop-down menu in Nuke, which
became a great advantage when finessing the look. Nuke also really took the burden off
our lighting team.”

Lighting the CG head and mask was a significant undertaking. Houdini shader structures
for each light were duplicated in the Nuke composite, along with constant and occlusion
passes, enabling the Nuke artists to view and adjust all of the lighting parameters used
in each particular scene.

But not only were the lights separate, shots were also rendered out with and without
shadows, allowing for an even greater degree of control during the Nuke composite.
When used with tracked and cloned rotos, it became especially helpful when blending
live action with CG material – such as in scenes where Rorschach grabs at, or touches,
his mask.

“Nuke made the compositing process so much more efficient, as we did not have to rely
on a lighter to keep on instructing the compositor. It was all there in Nuke,” says Astles.
“Ultimately, the lighters could get on with lighting shots, rather than having to make
revisions. Nuke saved us a lot of time – essential when you are working with a small
crew and excellent for productivity.”

© 2009 Warner Bros. Images courtesy of Intelligent Creatures.
Fundamental to the realism of the shots, were the tiny fibres on the mask, which did not
show up in the CG renders. A neat and quick fix saw the Houdini renders and the
combined lighting composited together in Nuke, along with a subtle blur, to take the
light and the colour past the edge of the mask. Merging the proper light and multiplying
the result over a constant path saw the fibres reappear.

Nuke was also used to perfect depth-of-field on Rorschach mask, using the Focal Plane
set-up on the Z-depth to create soft-edge mattes and apply defocus. Blend masks, plus
painted gradients with fades, rotos and colour corrections, were all used in the Nuke
processing tree to perfect the edge between the live action scarf and CG neck.

For a business that is competing in a global market Hatton says reliable support is
paramount. “Since we switched to Nuke, The Foundry’s support has been top notch. It
offers more reliable and attentive support, almost as if they were just down the street,
and has shown a real willingness to deal with the very few issues that we have had.
When we submit an issue, we feel confident that there will be some resolution, and not
just suggested workarounds.”

“Both the performance and the stability of Nuke have been superior to other products,”
continues Hatton. “Our previous compositing software would take minutes to even start
a render, even if the actual render was just a few seconds. This time lag became an
issue, not only to productivity, but also creativity. Since the creative process often relies
on in-the-moment ideas, excessive time lags can really be a hindrance to this process.
Nuke’s rendering speed is impressive and debugging problem renders is a lot easier than
before.

“Training artists on Nuke has been relatively painless too, and is becoming less of an
issue anyway since more and more artists are coming to us with prior Nuke experience,”
he says.

Klug adds, “Being able to keep our artists on Linux has been great. We’re able to develop
our pipeline under a single platform that provides a wealth of useful development tools
and ease of maintenance while reducing costs.”

For more info, please visit intelligentcreatures.com

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