DreamWorks Animation’s Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted has continued the success of this animated series of films, and the studio certainly upped the ante on the visual effects for this third outing which sees the New York Zoo animals head to Monte Carlo. We talk to Head of Effects Scott Peterson about banana guns, city-building and explosions.
fxg: What were some of the main challenges from an effects point of view that needed to be realized in Madagascar 3?
Peterson: While many effects teams strive for spectacle, we strive for absurdity. In a very general sense, our challenges in effects were to push the absurdity of our effects to make them fit into the exaggerated world of Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted, and to enhance the 3D experience of the audience.
Some of our most challenging effects include splatting bananas off of the ground from a strafing machine gun, spewing an oil slick that consists of flopping fish, exploding baby bird feathers from a pillow, creating a fireball explosion that our villain rides through, and creating glowing circus acts that are both luminous and super-saturated with color.
fxg: The flying banana gun is a great scene – can you talk about the R&D done at DreamWorks for the shots? How was the final effect achieved from a technical point of view?
Peterson: Having good reference video of an effect always helps artists to achieve more believable results. In the absurd world of Madagascar, reference footage can be hard to find. After having constructed an air cannon with my two boys at home to launch paper rockets, I realized that we could utilize the same gun to shoot bananas. We recorded artists mutilating bananas in various ways, including shooting them with this gun, in order to study how they splat when they strike various objects. Shooting bananas is the most fun that I’ve been paid to do while at DreamWorks Animation.
We simulated bananas exploding using a combination of rigid body chunks, and banana slime simulated as liquid particles. When the splats hit the ground, we made sure to point the splat explosions straight up into the air in order to mimic the effect of strafing that audiences are familiar seeing from war movies. This is not physically plausible given the angle of the gun to the ground, but it’s funnier. In the world of Madagascar, funny always trumps realistic.
fxg: Can you talk about the city building tools DreamWorks used for the film? What was the process in creating Monte Carlo buildings?
Peterson: We built Monte Carlo to support both a car chase and a aerial chase through the city during the first act of the film. We chose to create tools that give artists the ability to create buildings efficiently, rather than creating buildings procedurally. Kendal Cronkite, our Production Designer, embraces exaggerated proportions, shifting parallel line, breaking right angles, and introducing a sketchy quality to architecture. These qualities are not compatible with the procedural nature of tools that we developed to build Metro City for the movie Megamind.
Watch a clip from the film’s car chase.Similar to the procedural approach, a modeling artist first creates a library of building blocks used to flesh out the details of buildings. Building blocks consist of windows, doors, balconies, awnings, and any other detailed architectural elements replicated many times in a building.
The modeling artist then creates a coarse polygonal mesh representing a building. The artist can assign individual polygons a texture representing a building block, such as a window. This process results in creating a very efficient representation of a building. The art director evaluates it before it has any of the detailed building block geometry, so it remains malleable and lightweight. Polygons can be skewed and distorted in the process. Once the building is approved, the artist hits a button, and real geometry replaces the lightweight textures. Distortions and exaggerated proportions are preserved through the process of replacement.
We create multiple levels of detail by swapping utlizing simpler building blocks before replacement. We even changed the style of each level of detail version of each building in order to support an artistic choice to visually simplify detail for buildings in the
distance.
fxg: What were some of the explosion effects required for the film, and what techniques did you use to accomplish them?
Peterson: While escaping a casino in a luxury assault recreational vehicle, the penguins crush an exotic sports car that explodes into an inferno. The unaffected villain, Dubois, rolls through the inferno on her scooter. At first, we can only see her smoky silhouette through the explosion, which we embellished with a devil’s tail and horns.
To achieve the explosion, we utilized Maya’s fluid simulator in combination with rigid body car parts. Foreground fire is simulated as a combination of particles and fluid simulation. Dubois’ tail and horns are also smoke simulations emitted from phantom tail and horn geometry.
Temperature is mapped from a black and white image to color using compositing, which helped us to easily change colors without resimulating. To help integrate the detailed explosion with the stylized Madagascar world, we developed a post-process technique called swirl blur. Swirl blur creates spirals patterns around the brightest areas of the explosion.
All images and clips copyright © 2012 DreamWorks.