Visual effects artists at Vancouver-based The Embassy used Luxology's modo as they developed alien characters, weaponry and objects for 'District 9'. The Sony Pictures Imageworks alien-apartheid drama, produced by Peter Jackson and directed by Neill Blomkamp, debuted on Aug. 14.
As they worked on a buried alien ship, an alien pet, a missile launcher and an alien exo-suit for the film, visual effects artists Simon van de Lagemaat, Paul Copeland and the rest of the team relied quite heavily on modo’s advanced UV mapping tools, 3D painting and texturing capabilities. Some of their work involved models already created by WETA Digital, while other tasks involved ground-up modeling.
The Embassy Visual Effects
“We used modo for doing UV setup for our work on District 9 because it has great UV tools that are really fast,” says Copeland. “In fact, we even used it for organizing UVs that had already been done because the tools are so intuitive.”
One of the more complex modeling tasks was modeling an alien drop ship that was buried in the sand since it involved extensive mechanical modeling and edge detailing. “modo is a very good mechanical modeler,” says van de Lagemaat. “It’s just easier in modo than in other applications. Plus, it has a lot of really good tools for modifying what you have, which helped a great deal as the ship went through various revisions.”
The Embassy Visual Effects
Having just come off completing the Mark 1 sequence for Iron Man, the Exo-suit scene in 'District 9' was a perfect fit for boutique facility The Embassy. The Exo-suit is a very sophisticated piece of alien weaponry, essentially a larger-than-life mechanized suit of armor controlled by its wearer. The Embassy co-founder Winston Helgason spent one month on set in Johannesburg, South Africa supervising the sequence shoot.
The Embassy key-frame animated, rendered, and composited the Exo-suit for seamless scene integration. In total, The Embassy worked on just over 100 shots, mostly in the film's 12-minute climactic battle sequence. The company also created small lobster-like alien creatures used by both the Aliens and Humans in a type of cockfight.
Among the other modeling projects completed in modo was the creation of a base mesh for the alien pet, which is featured in the cockfighting scenes. Designers began with a scan of a physical sculpture of the character and created a displacement map that was put onto a cage made in modo. They then used modo’s 3D paint tools to apply colors for baking in 3D. “Being able to do 3D painting right in the modeling application is a very useful feature in modo,” says Copeland. “You can use it for final coloration or for just throwing down basic colors to figure things out.”
The Embassy Visual Effects
The Exo-suit sequence was shot primarily with RED Cameras, all handheld, so the Embassy team tracked and dropped the robot-like suit into the plates and used HDR lighting to match the hues on set. The CG in the scene was animated and rendered in Autodesk Softimage and composited using Shake.
The scene is very action-oriented and involved a lot of interaction between the CG Exo-suit with actors and set pieces. “This was a very complex sequence to work on. There were soldiers shooting, and each shot has composited bullet hits, dust on the ground for the suit's feet movement, and smoke added into the environment on top of the hero CG,“ said Helgason.
“This was our first time working with RED Camera footage for a feature, and while there were distinct advantages, such as no film grain and the ability to generate 4K versions of plates in-house, we were very mindful of the rolling shutter issues especially with the heavy compositing involved in reconstructing background plates,“ explained Supervising Compositor Stephen Pepper.
modo’s versatility was invaluable in doing look development for the Exo-suit featured in the film's climactic final sequence. “Because modo’s renderer is so fast, we could quickly set up shaders and occlusion maps,” says van de Lagemaat. “This was very helpful in simulating the dusty conditions on various parts of the exo-suit. We built some simple shaders and test-rendered it before moving it over to Autodesk Softimage. It’s great to go into the shading and rendering phase with a good idea of what something’s going to look like.”
As The Embassy’s main modeling application, modo integrates seamlessly into a pipeline that includes Autodesk Softimage XSI, mental images mental ray, Pixologic ZBrush and Apple Shake. For District 9, the artists used LWOs to go back and forth between applications. No matter what changes were done further down in the pipeline, all the modeling, texturing and look development work done in modo remained intact because of modo’s consistent stability.
“I like to describe modo as a stream-of-consciousness application,” says van de Lagemaat. “You just work fast and you don’t have to stop and read the manual. You click on a tool and everything’s just right there.”
