Brideshead: Houdini & Troubled Waters

Brideshead Revisited,” Miramax Films’ recently released feature adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel, is peppered with seamless invisible visual effects created by CIS London. Working closely with the film’s director, Julian Jarrold, visual effects supervisor Adam Gascoyne oversaw the challenging subtleties that were essential in bringing Jarrold’s version of the classic story to life.

fxguide spoke to the vfx artist in London.

The two central sequences requiring 3D and 2D effects included a military encampment setting during World War I, and another that takes place on an ocean liner journey. Attention to period detail was of great importance to the filmmaking team who relied on CIS London to bring the early twentieth century world to life in a completely photo-realistic way while remaining appropriate to the tone of the film.

Recalls Gascoyne, “For the ocean liner scenes, in addition to the actual vessel, its smoke funnels and 50 crew members, we were called upon to digitally create the environment of stormy seas and crashing waves. We even created an interior for the ship that we projected into the windows in order to give the proper sense of depth. For the Army scenes, using a variety of source material, we added everything from digital tents and vehicles to the Lancaster bombers.”

The pipeline was primarily Houdini. T.D. Danielle Brooks took an existing boat model and modified it in Maya to look the way the client wanted it to look. It was textured in Photoshop, using real boat textures from both CIS’s library and a shoot the team did along the banks of the Thames.

The boat was then imported into Houdini where the rest of the shot was completed. A custom displacement shader using layered noise was developed by CG Supervisor Sean Lewkiw to create fluid-like behaviour. This was written in Houdini VOPs with some VEX code, and was driven within Houdini by painted attributes on geometry. This same code was also used to displace the actual geometry so that they could extract height information, for example to get the ship to roll with the ocean. “We also used height information to extract whitecaps so that mist could blow off them, and they could be treated as breaking waves” comments Gascoyne. Over one hundred different wedge tests were rendered to get the exact combination of rolling water and choppy water. This proved to be more difficult than imagined as the team were unable to find any good reference of a Titanic sized boat sailing in a stormy ocean at night. “The wrong scale of features in the ocean only too readily destroyed the scale of the scene” he adds.

The background plate for the sky was rendered out from the scene camera as a UV map only so that any arbitrary matte painting could be inserted at the comp stage. Similarly, the reflection of the sky in the ocean surface was simply a UV map, and when the BG matte painting was swapped, the reflection would update to reflect this using a simple look-up node in Shake.

The team also extracted the intersection of the boat with the water surface, and used this to perform a fluid simulation to create the boat wake. This sim was baked out as a map to use in the ocean displacement shader, where the team had a lot of control over its decay and height. From this boat/water intersection, they were also able to create the churning wake behind the boat, and to create bow splashes. The bow splashes were again done in Houdini with a standard particle system, largely in a procedural fashion. “Since we had the velocity of the boat, and the velocity of the waves, (as we were able to create a geo version from the displacement shader code), we knew the summed velocity at the boat/water intersection, and to automatically birth splash particles at this point” , commented Gascoyne. “Additional painted attributes allowed us to tweak the splash height, spread and shape” he explained.

Shading, lighting and atmospheric effects were done by TD Danielle Brooks. Danielle wrote custom shaders in Houdini VOPs, and rendered the boat out with both traditional multi-pass lighting and PBR lighting. In addition, atmospheric effects were done with Houdini volume shaders to create a rolling fog. The smoke from the chimneys was created using Houdini volume cloud smoke.

The film, based on Evelyn Waugh’s acclaimed novel is adapted for the screen by multiple BAFTA Award-winner Andrew Davies (“Bridget Jones Diary,” “Bleak House”) and Jeremy Brock (“The Last King of Scotland”) and directed by Julian Jarrold (“Becoming Jane”).

Currently, CIS London is working on “Inkheart,” “Nutcracker: The Untold Story,” “Slumdog Millionaire” and “44 Inch Chest.”
Recent projects include “Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” “Tropic Thunder” and “Vantage Point”.