CGSociety

JUMP SEQUENCE
While building the variety of models posed problems, those tasks paled compared to the destruction, specifically the jump sequence and Vulcan planet implosion. That one sequence contained one third of ILM’s work at 250 shots long, and “was some of the first stuff in and the last stuff out,” according to Compositing Supervisor Eddie Pasquarello who was responsible for quality control on all the shots. He and his crew of compositors worked with roto paint and Digimatte, handled color correction, establishing looks, and worked with digital intermediary house, Company 3. “I spent my day constantly dealing with all the compositing issues as well as well as keeping sequences on track, making sure that we are doing things in a linear fashion, everything from the compositing to the roto paint. It’s a little like whack-a-mole. Things keep popping up and you hammer on them all day long.”

The jump sequence starts with the five mile Narada ship which has a five mile drill cable penetrating the core of Vulcan in an effort to destroy the planet. The scene then cuts to an Enterprise shuttle where three actors sky dive out and freefall several miles to the 40 foot diameter drill platform. It’s another challenge of scale.

Roughly a third of the platform was a practical set built at the Dodger Stadium parking lot, and sat six feet off the ground. The other two thirds were digital, as was the Vulcan terrain that appeared miles below. As the fight scene ensues, the sequence is a combo of live action on blue screen and set extensions. The actors leap from the platform and plummet towards the planet that is in full destruction, with spires crumbling and rocks and lava spewing towards them.

FRACTURE
To handle the destruction, the ILM team built a tool called Fracture that takes a digital model and breaks it into bits utilizing user defined controls and procedural controls. An artist can select one part of a landscape and break it up to look like rocks, telling it to make most of the pieces this size, but to add variation by adding more of it here, and less over there.

Fracture was also used to break apart the space ships. Michael DiComo, ILM Digital Production Supervisor explains. “We realized that procedure looked very rock-like which worked great for the planet and the landscapes, but didn’t work for the space ships, so we came up with a different technique. It was still part of Fracture but used a different pattern to break it up, a rectilinear pattern to look more like panels. Again it was user controls combined with procedural controls so you get the best of both worlds. You could pick the size the panels were, and how thick they were.”

ILM started with a model that was clean and intact, then fractured it to get the various bits. But then they had to make those bits move. That was handled by the Creature TD Department, a slightly deceptive title. The Creature TD’s used to handled rigging, enveloping, skin and muscle work on creatures, but now that department does rigid sims, cloth sims, and related effects. “That is the first level of the sim,” said DiComo “making everything move, but there are limitations. They don’t let the pieces get too small so the simulation engine can compute everything in a reasonable amount of time, since small debris can be added with a particle sim.” ILM took the moving debris and from that movement and resulting collisions, the R&D team designed a system that gathered data and recorded where the collisions occurred, how fast they collided, and how many faces of the geometry were involved, using that data to drive the particle simulations, a rigid sim that drives the particle sims.

Next ILM had to render the planet surface, the lava core inside, and the cloud particle sims over the surface of the planet that also get sucked into the destruction. “In that shot there were probably four dozen elements, so let’s say close to 50 different rendered passes and elements that get handed to the compositors”

DIGITAL DOMAIN
As so often happens in production now, the production schedule was so tight shots needed to be distributed to other FX companies. The original release was set for November of 2008 so Digital Domain (DD) was brought in to help. Even though the release was pushed back to spring of 2009, both studios were still restricted by the original budget so couldn’t enjoy a break in the schedule. DD only had roughly four months to complete their portion, and though it wasn’t that many shots, the lighting and tracking work was substantial.

ENGINEER BAY PIPE SEQUENCE
The engineer bay sequence was the most difficult due to tracking plates, matching existing pipes, adding refractions, fluid dynamics, and a complicated Scotty digital double wearing multiple layers of digital clothing reacting to water. DD ended up recreating the entire set of pipes in CG. Darren Poe, DD’s Digital FX Supervisor explained ”It was shot anamorphically, so we were dealing with wide lenses and distorted plates, bowing and lens flares, internal and interactive lighting from the camera pans, multiple sets of blades and cavitation from the blades in the water. We called it the Habitrail [but] no animals were harmed.”

In this sequence, a transporter mishap lands Scotty inside one tube in a network of clear acrylic coolant tubes, while Kirk lands on a platform nearby. Scotty, played by Simon Pegg, is being pulled through the water cooled piping towards the blades of the giant pump and an ugly demise, or as Lou Pecora, DD’s Compositing Supervisor called it, “turn him into Scotty Haggis.” Kirk races along side trying to save him.

The sequence was shot at an Anheuser-Busch Company brewery dressed up with large orange pipe connectors, but DD had to deviate from what was on set because it was too much of a limitation for how the digital Scotty to be animated through the pipes. DD was not on set to survey, and ILM and DD’s lens mapping technology is different so the lenses didn’t translate, “a big problem with anamorphic material, especially with the wide lenses that JJ was using,” said Pecora. “We had wide lens anamorphic hand held photography running through the brewery with a lot of parallax between foreground and background pipes, so no one track would never work throughout the whole shot.”

DD had to wrest the live action pipes to make sure they didn’t slip around. “I was worried about that at first, I really was. I thought it never going to fly and the tracking was never going to be quite right. In the old days of film you had gate weave and that saved your butt in tracking every time. But with digital projection you are never going to get rid of everything, any little slip would show up.” Add to that, nearly every shot had lens flares and was painstaking to get the CG work to match the practical set underneath the lens flares that would change as the camera moved. The digital double had to pass for Scotty, wear multiple layers of digital clothing reacting to the water.

It took a lot of brute force to make it work, and the team was “Holding our breath right along with Scotty,” said Pecora. “A track would work off in the distance and the foreground would be slipping around like an eel, then we would lock down the foreground so we would have a different track for one section of the shot than the other and in some cases the track was never able to get there in 3D, so we had to match it up in 2D frame by frame. We did the little trick where you invert the image and print it at half intensity so you can see if it drifts it looks like an embossed edge. You go frame by frame until you see it start to look embossed and force it back with a hand track in 2D. If a shot wouldn’t get there in 3D we would have to do it that way, with each individual pipe in some cases.”

Though the pipes looked like they would be the major challenge, it turned out to be much harder to dial in the look of Scotty within the pipes and making him match to the practical Scotty. Pegg was filmed swimming in water, so DD had to make sure the footage matched the digital double while making the bubbles match and the bubbles look like something other than just water bubbles, making the fluid appear more viscous, and adding the debris in the tubes.

DD DETAILS
Character work included the robot policeman who pursues young Kirk in the beginning. Late in the game Abrams decided the scene needed an authority figure that was more threatening. ILM did several character designs, Abrams picked one, and DD modeled everything and articulated the mask, matched up the plates and the lighting, added animated apertures in the eyes and added subtle high frequency animation to represent the speech. All that was done within the last couple of weeks of production.

On the ice planet, the small alien Keenser needed some parts of his face and his eyes replaced. DD added 3D eye sockets and added the metallic eyes. Said Poe, “We had to do painstaking lighting and compositing work to blend in the prosthetic and to track the actors eyes so the posts could follow the actors eye line. The eyes were shifted further back into the socket, and a skittering animation was added to add interest. All this was done procedurally.” And if you want your Easter eggs, here is one to look for; if you look in the background, there is an animated tribble in one of the cages. Guess you will have to go see the film again.

Related links:
Star Trek Movie
Industrial Light & Magic (ILM)
Russell Earl, ILM Co-Visual Effects Supervisor
Eddie Pasquarello, ILM Associate VFX Supervisor and Compositing Supervisor
Michael DiComo, ILM Digital Production Supervisor
Digital Domain (DD)
Darren Poe, DD Digital FX Supervisor
Lou Pecora, DD, Compositing Supervisor
Company 3

Discuss this article on CGTalk