'Firefall' Blur Studio

  • Interview with Kevin Margo, 'Firefall' CG Supervisor at Blur Studio
    CGSociety :: Production Focus
    19 October 2010

    "That's a nicely polished summary of what I'd call a truly unique and kick ass work environment filled with inspiring artists who bring tons of skill and heart to every project that goes through the studio." - Kevin Margo

    Kevin Margo has been at Blur Studio almost eight years now, and has been CG Supervisor for six of them. Projects he has handled just lately include the Firefall trailer, five minutes of cinematics for Knights Contract, half a dozen Mass Effect 2 TV Spots, 13 minutes of cinematics and a Superbowl commercial for Dante's Inferno, a Terminator Salvation trailer, and 10+ minutes of cinematics for Xmen Origins: Wolverine.

    Inspiration
    Blur Studio recently completed a trailer for Firefall, a team based action shooter developed by Red 5 Studio. Their mandate was simple: "Here are the characters, aliens, and environment we want to feature...please give us a three minute cinematic to support our game announcement at the PAX conference. Oh and by the way, we need it in seven weeks," Margo recalls.
    Firefall. Image courtesy of BLUR
     
    Firefall. Image courtesy of BLUR
    Knight's Contract. Image courtesy of BLUR
     
    Knight's Contract. Image courtesy of BLUR
    		From a visual standpoint the responsibility of each artist with each project is to deliver and evolve the expected Blur Studio quality. One of the benefits of the CG Supervisor position at Blur Studio is the opportunity to handle art direction, technical execution and experimentation with new software/tools. "This led to my interest in V-Ray and championing its full integration into the Blur pipeline," explains Margo. "With Firefall, my team and I had to deliver it looking as great as possible given the extremely tight schedule."

    Kevin Margo was the first artist on the project and last off it. About 60 people had a hand in the project, with a core team of about 20 artists completing the entire cinematic in seven very intense weeks. This project called for a broad master plan of execution which he was tapped for constantly. "A lot of my time was spent on look development, critiquing artist progress, organization, facilitating communication, and anticipating and resolving hurdles before they impacted production," Margo continues. "Once the scope and script was sorted out, I worked closely with all the departments from a technical and art direction standpoint." Margo kept a guiding eye on characters, environments, props, lighting, shaders, hair and FX. The lighting direction, master shot and compositing workflows were established for a (nearly) smooth roll out to the team. Towards the end he jumped into production, helping the lighting and compositing team on shots that needed some extra love to hit the bar through to delivery.
    Knight's Contract. Image courtesy of BLUR
     
    The Backstage experience
    When Kevin Margo was near to completing his work on EA game Dante's Inferno, he began talking with his lighting/scene assembly leads about the many rendering issues/hurdles encountered. "We had RAM issues on large environments without a functioning proxy system, render times were rising unacceptably high attempting to resolve sampling and GI flickering, vector moblur and Z-Depth DOF in post started to feel very dated," he said. "Blur Studio had occasionally used V-Ray on a few small scale projects, and the results highlighted on those projects were VERY appealing to us. Seeing how V-Ray could easily produce creamy smooth GI lighting, camera DOF and motion blur, fast displacements and BSP instancing/proxy objects caught my attention."

    In the door of Blur came a modestly sized cinematics job for the upcoming Knight's Contract game. "These kinds of jobs are always fun. They're very flexible on the front end creative, and aren't burdened with established expectations from client or a fan base that would squelch the team's engagement, leaving plenty of room for substantive creative contributions by every artist," describes Margo. "Projects like this invite visual experimentation that leads to new ways of working. The script, calling for a landscape dense with tall wheat stalks and grass, created the opportunity and necessity that we look into V-Ray."

    "The one concern I had was the sparse proof of a sexy looking V-Ray skin shader. Blur Studio cinematics are very character centric and if they didn't look appealing no amount of glossy GI lighting would save the project. After a few weeks of testing the SSS2 skin shader, and some custom built updates from Chaos, we decided the skin, and the other attractive features would suit our needs so we committed to V-Ray. Knights Contract turned out looking great, the lighting team raved about the smooth workflow V-Ray presented, and Blur Studio hasn't looked back since. Since then we've used V-Ray on a killer DCU Online trailer, this Firefall project, a film pitch for The Goon, and some upcoming big name projects."

    For the Firefall cinematic, the Blur Studio lighting team needed fast renders in iterative fashion. A smooth, clean workflow mean't better handling of shots between artists. "Sweet looking results with less per shot fiddling were demanded, and V-Ray did all this for us," Margo confirmed.
    Knight's Contract. Image courtesy of BLUR
    Firefall. Image courtesy of BLUR
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  • Firefall. Image courtesy of BLUR
    Firefall. Image courtesy of BLUR
    		Shaders
    Kevin Margo's team used Bercon Maps on the environment, and the SSS2 skin shader. Also, 3ds Max's Hair and Fur was used for the short-haired male soldier with a heavily tweaked V-Ray material to capture the hair anisotropy and back-scattering. "We also used Forest Pack Pro to scatter rocks about the landscape, tapping into V-Ray's spiffy bsp instancing/proxy features," adds Margo.

    The Blur Studio lighting team got beauty passes that looked great, with the option to export individual render element passes to use as needed. "In most shots we had three or four passes," explains Margo. "Environment beauty, character beauty, fog and hair. The robust V-Ray matte object properties came in handy as we split out the characters from environment and needed to preserve all the subtle GI and reflection contributions of the environment onto our characters. We added in some misc FX elements and auxiliary passes per shot as needed. Sometimes we'd use the multimatte pass to key certain objects worth CC'ing in post. I dig Baroque painting, so we put the normal passes to use in post for exaggerated Chiaroscuro effects as a nod to Carravagio."

    For Firefall, Margo tells us DOF and Motion Blur were the other valuable features. The Firefall director and he, developed a side workflow that enabled him to quickly step through all the shots and keyframe f-stop and DOF values on the vrayPhysical camera with fast visualization and easily hand off back to the lighting team. "With V-Ray's clever glossy sampling system, it was no sweat to turn on motion blur as well without worry of skyrocketing render times," says Margo, "which were between one and two hours a frame. That varied greatly with shot context...so it's just a ballpark."
    Knight's Contract. Image courtesy of BLUR
     
    V-Ray Environment Fog
    For the general ambient fog, Blur used V-Ray Environment Fog. It provided a ton of control and with careful manipulation, it's reasonable to render using GI and area lighting. Margo's team used it as a separate pass for local refinement of sampling issues that were specific to the nature of raymarched fog. "The atmosphere was a necessary story prop," he explains. "I needed art directable control over its behavior and V-Ray Fog proved capable. We found exciting and varied effects experimenting with different 3D procedural map types in the density channels...noises, cellulars, smokes,etc."

    Kevin Margo says he'd like to see a more robust hair styling and rendering system in V-Ray that makes full use of spline primitive rendering with a dynamic generation/ram flushing capability. "There are a few hair plugin solutions that have semi-complete implementation to V-Ray, but none that satisfies all our varied and demanding production needs," he conceded.

    He also cited a user friendly handling of tiled map types like .exr's, tiffs or .vrimgs used in shaders. He feels the Max/V-Ray implementation is a bit thin at the moment. He looks forward to V-Ray RT integration and feature expansion, and further development of GPU tech. "I also want to experiment with spherical harmonics in V-Ray for 3ds Max, curious to see how it'll work in a raytracer," he concluded.
    Firefall. Image courtesy of BLUR
    Firefall. Image courtesy of BLUR
     
    Firefall. Image courtesy of BLUR

    Final result
    "Given our time constraints I'm highly impressed with the results, and eager to flex V-Ray's capabilities on a project more reasonably paced that allows for some thoughtful experimentation and refinement. We're just getting V-Ray warmed up," he says. "Hitting the deadline was thanks in HUGE part to the unfettered commitment by the entire Blur Studio team to pull a challenging project like this together. After eight years at Blur Studio it was a surprisingly fresh experience and pleasant reminder of the immense talent here."

    About Blur
    Blur Studio has been creating award-winning visual effects, animation and design, applying its creative skills across various mediums. We produce 3D character animation, motion design and visual effects for feature films and television, game cinematics & trailers, large format films, location-based entertainment, commercials and integrated media. Located in Venice, California, we combine the passion and excitement from our directors, animators, designers, concept artists, and writers with our clients into a collaborative creative approach that results in compelling visuals and storytelling.

    Related links:
    Blur studio
    Kevin Margo
    Firefall
    Red 5 Studio
    Bercon Maps
    Knight's Contract

    Chaos Group


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