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Roland Emmerich is best known for his ability to make worlds
blow up in fantastic fashions - destruction porn as it's
called in the VFX industry. From Independence Day to 2012, the
director has had a passion for disaster movies and always
ensures a screen rocking explosion as he destroys the city's
most famous buildings and landmarks. For his latest film
project, Anonymous, the only thing he wishes to destroy is the
myth surrounding William Shakespeare's writing skills.
While the topic of who wrote Shakespeare's many plays
and poems has been pondered for quite a length of time, the
movie is not a mystery. It is drama set amongst political and
artistic intrigue. A tremendous shift from Roland Emmerich's
usual genre.
We spoke with Gregory Chalenko, Digital
Compositor and Compositing TD at Uncharted Territory, about
his team's work on the project, the macros he created to work
within their Fusion pipeline, and UT's partnership with eyeon
Software.
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| Q. Uncharted Territory's entire
postproduction pipeline for Anonymous was based on Fusion. What
did you see as the main benefits?
First of all,
Fusion's versatility. There is no other software available that
offers such a comprehensive compositing toolset along with a
powerful 3D suite, particle effects, Arcanoid, and other diverse
creative tools.
We could let the 3D team concentrate on
the most complicated 3D tasks, such as intense modeling, while 3D
procedures such as 2D to 3D conversion, camera animations,
generation of realistic smoke, fog, and bird flocks were done by
the compositing department.
No one had to sacrifice
his/her sleep and beer time, thanks to Fusion.
Q.
Many customized tools and macros were developed. Which was your
favourite? How does it work? How was it used? How did it simplify
or improve your team's everyday work?
I developed
a number of general purpose macro tools during the Anonymous
project, among them were:
Alpha EdgeCCv
http://vfxpedia.com/index.php?title=Settings_and_Macros/AlphaEdgeCCv_Description
  
The Alpha Edge CCv
macro can create highly controllable masks for object edges. Its
primary purpose is to adjust edges after keying but it can also be
used for creative tasks if you want to make contours around
objects.
Blurred Edges Restoration
http://vfxpedia.com/images/BlurredEdgesRestoration_v03.setting
Blurred
Edges Restoration aids in the cases when you need to replace the
background behind a motion blurred or defocused object. The issue
would be that the blurred edges contain details from the
background so you have to shrink the objects to get rid of the
artifacts. Sometimes the shrunk objects get significantly thinner.
This macro restores the blurred areas with the foreground object's
colors.
Subtract BG Color
http://vfxpedia.com/images/SubtractBGColor_v01.setting
  
Subtract BG Color
is used in cases when a 3D object is rendered with the Alpha
channel against a non-black background (colored or textured). Even
if you post-multiply the image, some background texture will
remain around the edges and in semi-transparent areas. Using the
rendered object plate and the clean background plate, the macro
completely removes unwanted background remains. This tool can also
help in the previous case if you have a blurred object, a mask for
it, and a clean background plate.
Primary
Grade
The Primary Grade macro is my favourite. It
streamlines the color correction process and makes the adjustments
much easier to read.
There were also some special macros
developed for the Anonymous pipeline:
World Pass Scene
Positioner
Created to place ImagePlane3Ds into a 3D scene
by merely picking values from a pre-rendered position pass. It
really saved time when I had to populate the city wide shots with
smoke from numerous chimneys. The smoke made with particles was
pre-rendered to sequences and then placed into the planes. This
macro was based on Robert Zeltsch's technique.
Center Cropped Texture
This macro is applied
to the image planes to position a certain point of the texture to
the world coordinate center. For example, we have smoke which
rises upwards and to the side, it's reasonable to crop the image
with smoke so that the emission point was in the corner and the
empty area was excluded but then the emission point doesn't
correspond to the ImagePlane3D’s center and when you automatically
align the plane with a chimney, the smoke appears shifted. This is
when this magic macro comes into play. It takes the emission point
coordinates from metadata embedded to the texture and shifts the
ImagePlane3D. So, you pick the smoke position with the World Pass
Scene Positioner and the beginning of the smoke suddenly
corresponds to the chimney.
PrepareTexture
Incorporates the functionality
of Center Cropped Texture and decreases the image resolution
depending on the distance between the image plane and the camera.
Such optimization is important when you have hundreds of smoke
stacks over the city and some of them are barely visible near the
horizon, yet the smoke textures are 2K.
Some of my
previously developed macros were also used and improved during the
project. The most popular in the team were:
AdvancedCameraShake
http://vfxpedia.com/index.php?title=Settings_and_Macros/AdvancedCameraShake_Description
  
Create
natural looking camera shake effects.
AnimationGhosting3D
http://vfxpedia.com/index.php?title=Settings_and_Macros/AnimationGhosting3D_Description
Used for 3D
animation to see an object's trajectory in onion skin style.
ColorFill
http://vfxpedia.com/index.php?title=Settings_and_Macros/ColorFill_Description
  
One of the
simplest but most frequently used macros. Fills a selected area of
the image with a flat color.
Q. There also was a
collaboration between Uncharted and eyeon. How did you like the
feedback and support supplied by eyeon software on the project?
What special tasks where solved?
As we pushed the
limits, the outstanding support eyeon happily provided us was
really important. I did my best to make the new macros
user-friendly and Stephen Horwat, who represented the eyeon team
at the Uncharted office, showed some tricks which let me rise the
interface usability to a new, higher level. And, there was some
instant help with math, particles and spare chocolate.
We
also discussed the most anticipated new features and tested them
immediately in newly generated Fusion compositions. Sometimes it
was about 10 minutes between an idea and its implementation.
It's a really great feeling when you participate in
developing your favourite application and see how your ideas work.
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