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     CGNetworks Feature :: Star Wars Episode III:
    Revenge of the Sith
    Barbara Robertson, 8th June 2005    		   
     Let’s talk numbers: 2,151 visual effects shots. 185 digital characters. $300 million opening box-office growing to $500 million after the second weekend. 1,083 animation shots. A digital villain with 200 articulating joints and 4,591 NURBS surfaces. 375,040 frames delivered. 6,598,928 rendering hours total. 12,855,000 successful renders and comps. 375 CG models and environments. 47 practical models. A crew of 350. Could it be anything else but Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith?   
     From the eight-minute opening space battle—all CG but for a few practical elements—to the climactic battle between Obi-Wan and Anakin over the fiery rivers of hell—a mix of live action footage, CG and motion control photography of miniatures, Episode III takes moviegoers into the dark side of Lucas’ fantasy world. Critically acclaimed, a box office success, and, thanks to Industrial Light & Magic, a visual effects tour de force, it ends Lucas’ nearly 30-year long Star Wars journey with a bang.

    New tools helped. The latest HD cameras and VTRs, Sony’s HDC-F950 camera and SRW-1 and SRW-5000 VTRs that used a 10-bit 4:4:4 RGB format. The increased color depth and dynamic range made it easier for the crew to do precise blue screen extractions and gave them the latitude to push images in post. The film looks richer than before and the composites even more seamless.

    A practiced crew and tight organization made it possible. John Knoll, who won visual effects Oscar nominations for Episodes I and II, and for ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, supervised 1,700 shots; Roger Guyett, who received an Oscar nomination for ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’, handled the rest. Rob Coleman, who also received Oscar nominations for Episodes I and II, returned as animation director and acted as second unit director for the Wookie sequence.

    “It was a very well organized film,” says Knoll. “It had to be because you’d die if it wasn’t. On a little show, if you’re under a hundred shots, it can be complete pandemonium and you can still get it done. When you’re doing 2,000 shots, it has to be scheduled like clockwork. You have to make sure everything is carefully prepped so there are no kinks in the pipe; that stuff is ready when it’s supposed to be ready.”

    		 
     
    		 
  • Coleman began working on Episode III in November 2002 and completed his last shot on March 4, 2005. “On Episode I, there were 60 minutes of animation,” he says. “On Episode II, 70 minutes and we had 60 animators. On Episode III, there are 90 minutes of animation and we had 40 animators. That includes character work and space ships. We’ve passed the length of an animated feature.”

    Three digital characters star in the film—General Grievous, the four-armed villainous android, a flying lizard named Boga, and Yoda. All were created using Maya and ILM’s proprietary software.
    “Grievous was the most complicated creature,” says James Tooley who oversaw character rigging and simulations. “He’s got four arms and lots of articulating bits. He walked in different ways. We had to constrain the rigs so when the arms move, the other pieces move away. For Yoda, we kept the rigging from Episode II. Some of the clones were also similar because we wanted to use the same motion capture library.”

        
     
    		 Boga was a special case. Three sims ride along with this huge, fast-moving creature that transports Obi-Wan through the sink holes of Utapau – flesh, skin, and feathers. For the latter, the crew used cloth simulation. Creature supervisor Aaron Ferguson, devised a system in which animators shaped targets for the feathers. “The simulation would aim toward the targets,” says Ferguson.

    The biggest changes for Yoda, according to Coleman, were in adding details that allowed the camera to move closer to the digital puppet double. A little fuzz on his cloak, translucency in his ears from subsurface scattering, more control over the way light illuminated his skin. “We could really delve into the acting,” Coleman says.

    But while these digital stars capture the spotlight, the technical “stars” were methods for creating so many creatures and digital doubles quickly. “For Episode III we did two big things,” says Tooley. “We streamlined the building of digital doubles and created a new GUI interface so we could get the creatures up and running fast.”

    Efficiency ruled. Crew scripts put pilot clones into the right spaceships. Naming conventions were standardized so that motion capture data could be more easily applied to multiple creatures. Hair simulations could be repurposed from one digital Wookie to another. A cloth sim for a sleeve could be revised without re-simulating an entire Jedi cloak.

    “We did a lot of digital double work,” says Juan Luis Sanchez, creature simulation supervisor. “We knew it would hold up, that we had the skills to make the match. I don’t think you’ll know that a character went from live action to CG or from CG to live action in one shot. It felt seamless.”

    		 
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      Behind these characters, complex digital backgrounds set a variety of stages for the great battles – the space battle in the atmosphere above Coruscant, the Wookie battle near the lake on Kashyyyk, the fight between Obi-Wan and Anakin on fiery Mustafar, as well as skyscapes outside the window during tender scenes between Padme’ and Anakin.

    Digital matte painters using Photoshop and a variety of 3D modeling and rendering packages – 3ds max, Brazil, Maya, Softimage, RenderMan, mental ray – crafted the huge establishing shots for such planets as the city-world of Coruscant, the wistful lake and forest Kashyyyk, Utapau, the sinkhole planet. And not just one painting.

    		 
        
      
        
      
     “We’d come back to some planets five, six, seven times during the day,” says Jonathan Harb, digital matte supervisor, “and the moods were very important to George [Lucas]. Blue sky, stormy, sunset.”

    The 33 matte artists projected paintings onto rendered models of cities and landscapes and then tweaked the paintings for the establishing shots and for paintings throughout the film. Harb guesses that 75 percent of the shots used matte paintings.

    In addition to matte painters, thanks to a new tool called Zenviro, technical directors and others in the pipeline began projecting textures onto 3D models – and 2D cards in 3D environments. Developed initially to help matte painters work in 3D environments using models or cards when appropriate, the tool has grown into a system that allowed Lucas to move a virtual camera through virtual sets mapped with high resolution images in post production.

    On Mustafar, however, CG elements created much of the environment. Custom particle systems that had to match live action footage and footage of motion control photography created flaming lava falls, blazing geysers, and rivers of fire. The teams of ILM wizards led by Willi Geiger plan to present SIGGRAPH papers on the techniques used to create lava and also the explosions in the opening space battle sequence.

    As has been true for all six episodes of Star Wars, this one, Episode III, once again pushed the state of art for computer graphics and visual effects into the future.

    		 
    		 
        
    Image Credits:
    © Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved. Digital work by ILM.     		 Related links:
    StarWars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
    ILM
    LucasFilm
    		 
        
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