VFX focus: Clash of the Titans

[NewsMaker]

As the stop-motion epic gets updated for the CG era, 3D World uncovers the secrets of the movie's heavenly environments


Image (c) 2010 Warner Bros Entertainment Inc/Legendary Pictures


As a ten-year-old, Kevin Jenkins was running around in a Clash of the Titans T-shirt. Three decades later, he was building Mount Olympus.

For Louis Leterrier’s modern reworking of Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion epic, Jenkins – now digital environment supervisor at Framestore – led a team of 25 matte painters, texture artists and TDs to create many of the movie’s key settings, including the medusa temple, the witches’ mountain and, of course, Olympus itself.

But it wasn’t always such a titanic undertaking. When Jenkins began work on the project last September, the plan was for Framestore to do only a handful of mattes and set extensions.

But by the end of the year, that total had swollen to 125 shots, as Warner Bros turned to Framestore to recreate many of the movie’s hero environments.

“I was expecting normal run-of-the-mill stuff with a few nice choice hero shots to keep everybody happy,” says Jenkins. “[By the end] it seemed every other shot we were doing was an environment shot.”

“For example, the Olympus establisher turned into a fully CG shot recreating the sky, the building, the mountain, the trees – everything.”


MIXING UP THE PIPELINE
With just over two months of post-production time remaining after the approval of his new concept work, Jenkins adopted to assign software on a per-shot basis.

“I’m a fan of whatever works best, rather than being rigidly pushed down a [single software] route,” he says.

Accordingly, the digital environments, although created in Maya, were rendered in both RenderMan and mental ray.

“I was a huge fan of us using the best that mental ray’s final gather and global illumination has to offer. It gives you so much for free,” he says. “You take a bit of a back-end hit as far as render times go, but you get a front-end look development [pipeline] that really is very hard to work in RenderMan.”

“In RenderMan, you have a very structured pipeline,” he continues. “Someone builds you a shader, you attach textures to that shader, you attach it to an object, you start to do look dev. But as an environment guy, I don’t know really what I need until I get there; and mental ray gives you more of that flexibility.”

While RenderMan was retained on certain shots for its acknowledged strengths (“things involving heavy displacement were very scary, so some of those had to got back into RenderMan” says Jenkins) most ended up with a mixture of elements rendered in the two applications.

The end result, he feels, vindicates the means.

“There were a few things that came [back] to kick us in the butt but mostly it was very successful. Some of the render times got absolutely enormous as we turned up the antialiasing, even if we were baking out the final gather. But we were offsetting a beauty render we were happy with for render times.”


THE NATURAL WORLD
The same approach prevailed when it came to the organic elements in the landscapes.

“Doing environments means you have to have a go at anything,” says Jenkins. “I was using everything from Vue … to free plant generators we found on the internet.”

Vue, in particular, played a key role in the vegetation work. “There were absolutely tons of shots in Clash that used it,” says Jenkins.

However, he feels that while “Vue’s potential under the hood is enormous”, greater exposure of the code beneath that hood would increase the software’s appeal when it comes to integrating it into a VFX pipeline.

“Vue was very successful in what we used it for; but we were very particular in what we used it for,” he notes.


A TRULY EPIC UNDERTAKING
The variety of the software used mimics the variety of the shots completed. As Jenkins points out, Clash of the Titans has it all: “fantasy landscapes, castles, everything you want to do as an environment artist … rather than a street set extension, you’re doing the world.”

The result, he feels, is not so much a slavish copy of the original but a modern reimagining: a remake rather than a redo.

“We made sure we paid tribute to [the original] but I didn’t want to let a shot through until it felt like it was in the movie, and not a cheesy painting,” Jenkins says. “I made the team try 110% to make things look cool.”

And, as an avowed Harryhausen fan, the thrill of working on the movie was all the greater. “We’re all huge fans,” says Jenkins. “Star Wars and Harryhausen are the reasons we do this.”

Clash of the Titans is on general release now. Read more about the movie's creature effects work in issue 129 of 3D World


Click here to order issue 129 online



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