G.I.JOE

Ken Nakada came on board Prime Focus VFX -- then called Frantic Films -- in February 2008. He was recruited to spearhead the company’s new digital mattes & concepts division. "My professional background includes two-and-a-half years with Momentum/LookFX as visual effects supervisor and designer overseeing the company’s digital environment team," he says. "I also spent five years at RIOT, first as a senior matte painter, later as a VFX supervisor, and eventually became the company’s director of visual effects. I’ve also freelanced in the matte paintings departments of Industrial Light & Magic, Stan Winston Digital, ESC Entertainment, Cinesite and Captive Audience. I got my start in matte painting and visual effects at Illusion Arts in Van Nuys, CA where he spent six years. Some films I’ve worked on in which I’m most proud include 'Apocalypto,' 'City of Ember,' 'Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow' and 'X-Men.'"

Prime Focus VFX digital mattes and concepts division was created to do everything from straight matte paintings to full 3D projections in 100 percent CG environments. This environment work includes CG hard surface models, fully interactive CG water, CG people and CG atmospherics.

Most recently, the team helped design cloudscapes and aerial vistas for the high altitude chase sequence for 'G.I. JOE: The Rise of Cobra.' This chase travels from earth's upper stratosphere to near ground-level sweeps of the Potomac River.

Rob Ward has been designing and supervising concepts for several movies. Along with Matte Painter Elias Gonzalez and Environmentalist Ethan Summers, he's worked on concept designs for the Night Raven aircraft and environments in 'G.I. JOE' and backgrounds for 1930s New Orleans in 'Bolden and Louie.' Along with matte painters Susan Stewart and Tracey Mclean, they've done interior aircraft designs, a mystical desert karate training camp and a desert temple for 'Dragonball Z.' "We also have an exciting slate of upcoming movies coming out," he says, "but it’s too early for us to discuss those films just yet."

Looking at the storyline, the guys knew they had to cover cloudscapes starting from a secret arctic base, then traveling to the skies above Russia with an about-face back to the eastern seaboard of North America, then diving down the Potomac river and traveling for a few miles near ground-level to the White House before shooting up to the edge of the earth's stratosphere, and then back down to the White House lawn. "We tested several terrain-generating software and found that they were very strong in creating looks for us," Ken Nakada tells us. "Matte painting could then take these frames and flush out finished renderings of the environment. We had tons of reference photography of the many different cloud types at different elevations, from ground level looking up at skies to satellite images looking down at earth's atmosphere and tons of others in between. We also had copious amounts of aerial footage, stunt pilots, that sort of thing."

Photographs are always used as reference. For mattes, they set the bar for that the artists try to achieve in their creations. Photos are used as much as possible to ground the realism. "That being said," qualifies Ken, "in this job hardly any photography was used in the creation of the cloudscapes because the camera was always moving too fast and continuity had to be maintained across many miles of environment."

"So photography served as our guide but we had to recreate our cloudscape environments. That applies for the cloudscapes but the opposite was true for the part of the sequence in which we’re traveling along the Potomac River. This part of the sequence was near ground level and we could take our own reference photographs."

Concept to screen
Once approval was gained on the concepts, Prime Focus needed to make it work for the real shots. Cameras moving at high velocity passed clouds close to camera and would need 3D to sell the parallax. Artists Ethan Summers and Marcus Levere helped work out a pipeline to generate these volumetric clouds. Digital elevation maps from the U.S. Geological Survey were often used as starting points for terrain generation. Sometimes they used satellite weather pattern images as node inputs for cloud-generating algorithms.

The 3D Lighting and Rendering Lead Chris Pember provided some very realistic water to complete the shots. For this he used the in-house software Flood Surf, and for rooster tails and water thrown up by the jet, FumeFX.

"Sometimes there were as many as two 3ds Max scene files, two Maya scene files, two Terragen scene files, and multiple Photoshop files per shot," explains Ken Nakada. "Keeping all of these render passes in order was difficult enough, but there were often camera changes too! When this happened, new camera nodes had to be created for all the scene files for rendering multiple passes from each scene file. All these passes necessitated a large farm, so rendering was a challenge."

"We found we needed the strengths of many different software packages, as well as different VFX techniques and opted to write custom tools to achieve our goal, which led to a cluster of fun trying to keep all the passes straight. Spreadsheets that each artist could update simultaneously were key, and compositing and LnR had to be able to keep track of all these passes as well. Everyone had to be absolutely religious about updating their elements and inform artists downstream about the updates," adds Nakada. "We used Photoshop, Terragen, Vue, Maya, 3ds Max, Krakatoa, V-Ray, and Fusion, and Prime Focus Software’s Flood Surf and FumeFX."