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| Updated 27/1/2003 |
Here's a quick description of some of the projects I've been involved in recently.
In the latest James Bond extravaganza it was again up to director Daniel Kleinman and Framestore CFC to come up with some stunning visuals for the titles sequence. This was somewhat of a departure from the previous films in that the titles seqence actually plays a part in telling the story of the movie, as we see Bond being tortured after his capture. There is a theme of pain and suffering visualized partly through the characters of the 'Fire Woman' and 'Ice Woman'.
The Ice Woman was done in 3D, and I was responsible for creating a shader for the ice look, and also for lighting the majority of the shots where she is featured. During production I developed some custom tools for Maya to animate cracks appearing within the model as she moves, and also to run drops of water down the surface as she melts. I attended the filming for the sequence at Pinewood Studios - to do my bit to ensure the girls were all moving in just the right way... least I could do really.
For more on information on this sequence, see the page setup by my colleague Andy Daffy, who was CGI supervisor for this project.
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This commercial spot has the feel of a nature documentary, as we begin out at sea viewing massive shoals of what appear to be fish. As the sequence progresses we begin to see that they are not fish but actually people. Eventually they reach land, and the leader of the group sets foot on the beach and strides up. The message of course is the motto of Johnnie Walker - Keep Walking.
For this project I was responsible for animating thousands (more than 8500 in one of the shots) of people moving to give the impression of fish shoaling together. To achieve this I first animated particle systems using Maya's particle dynamics and some custom scripts. Then, I took the swim cycles created by our animators and applied them to geometry instances on the particles in such a way that their swimming could be sped up and slowed down to match their overall movement. Then it was a matter of doing lots of work to randomize their movements, cycles and the geometry in order to avoid any feeling of computer generated 'sameness' amongst the group.
The still images don't really show up the effect too well - it is more in the movement than the look, which was intended to be quite dim and moody in the early parts of the spot.
Like the movie itself, the first trailer released for the latest Bond movie features an ice motif, and it required a '007' logo made of ice to shatter toward camera after being shot by Bond himself. The logo shattering was initially attempted by filming a model being blown apart by compressed air guns. When the results of this turned out to be less than spectacular, it was up to the Framestore CFC 3D department to rescue the situation.
To create this shot, I first modelled a panel to represent the sheet of ice, and carefully broke it up (a combination of Maya's 'shatter' function and a lot of hand-modelling) into pieces radiating out from the center, where it was to be shot through by the bullet. I then placed a particle at the centre of each chunk of ice in 3D, and used Maya's dynamics to blow the particles out in the desired way, then constrained each chunk of ice to it's relevant particle. The initial result was good, but we ended up manually animating additional tweaks to the rotation and movement of the pieces for a more realistic effect.
Finally, I created a shader that would give a good compromise between a realistic ice look and the look of the logo image, and I lit the scene. When compositing the shot, we started off with the initial 2D logo, and composited on each chunk of ice only as it begins to move. In this way you do not get any of the pre-cracked geometry showing up too early (i.e. premature ecrackulation).