SHE SAILS ONCE MORE
The long anticipated release of James Cameron's Titanic finally arrived on Friday December 19th in the US. The three hour fifteen minute long movie features some of the most seamless, invisible visual effects ever conceived. In all, over 15 visual effects houses were handed shots for the movie, including ILM, Blue Sky|VIFX, POP Film, Matte World Digital, and Cinesite.
Digital Domain were given the task of producing the extraordinary number of visual effects sequences for the epic love story set on board the most famous ship in the world. Although several huge model miniatures of the Titanic were constructed at both Digital Domain and Donald Pennington, Ltd., to many, the most exciting aspect of the movie was the extraordinary array of digital effects used to recreate history and allow the awesome ship to sail once again.
In this shot (TD27), the ship itself is a model miniature. However, Digital Domain created CG characters, digital water, flags, CG birds, and the smoke for extremely fx intense sequence (there are no live action elements in this shot at all).
Water, fish, smoke, birds, stars, flags, and for some shots the ship itself all had to be created digitally by the teams of artists working under the supervision of Judith Crow. Visual Magic caught up with Judith for a chat about the almost cosmic in scale project and the difficulties faced.
What exactly was your job on Titanic, what did you do?
I supervised four teams of artists working on 3D effects. The first team, Digital Integration, put together motion control camera data and tracked shots where known camera data didn't exist. Then they set up all of the scenes so that there was one core place that they all existed, and from which they could be distributed to the other teams.The second team was the Ocean team, and they, obviously, did all of the digital water. That included elements such as the ocean surface, wakes, whitewater that lies on the surface and the reflections. All of those aspects were both for the day water, and the night water.
Team three were the Digital Ship Extension team, and they were responsible for building the quite detailed portions of the ship in CG, texturing them, and lighting them so that we could recreate parts of the set that weren't actually built. The fourth team we called the Digital Paraphernalia team because they basically did absolutely everything else! The things like smoke, and the stars, and the birds, cables, and flags, and all those little bits-and-pieces that finish off the shots.
In terms of software, did you use mainly in-house software or commercially available programs?
It was a mix - we can never find one single piece of software that does everything we wanted it to do. So, at the beginning of the process, for the tracking and setting up the camera, we have a really amazing piece of in-house software called Track, which was devised by Doug Roble; Given an object of known dimensions, and photographs of that object in the set, the remainder of the set geometry can be recreated using a process known as stereo reconstruction. Once the set dimensions are known the camera can then be tracked. The results are incorporated into a representation of the scene in Prisms. From there, the ocean team had built a custom interface in Prisms to Arete, the rendering software. Renderman was also used for some of the water. For the digital ship team, they were actually using LightWave running on NT. And then for the paraphernalia team they used mostly Prisms with some Dynamation. So it was quite a complex web of software that we used.
How did you approach the water?
As Titanic leaves Southampton docks, we see some fantastic digital water. The surface was, as described, created using Arte software, while the spray at the front of the boats was created using the Prisms particle system. Other elements such as smoke and some fantastic matte paintings of the docks were created for this sequence.
Image courtesy of the VFX HQ.
The surface of the water was generated by Arete software, which is all physics based and you basically just give it a wind speed and a wind direction, and that creates the surface of the water. We also needed to derive a height map from which to drive the particles systems that create the spray around the ship itself, on the bow, and along the sides - that was all done with the Prisms particle system. And then there some parts where we just used texture maps on the surface of the water to simulate side and rear wakes.What about the underwater scenes, were any of those CG?
Yea, there's one scene that was entirely CG, where you see the cavitation coming off the propellers. The ship goes over your head, you get a close-up of the propellers and see all of those little bubbles coming off their surfaces. The ship hull came from the NT group who were handling all the ship extensions, while the cavitation effect was developed by Matthew Butler using Prisms.I know that during production there were a lot of rumours going around about the challenges that you were facing, but were there any real problems?
Well, in a way we had the same problems that you always have, in that the sense that the scope of the work tends to change for the duration of the project. So you start out thinking that there's a certain number of shots of a certain kind, and then it all becomes a bit more ambitious and more work is added. Those kinds of things happen in all productions, only in Titanic they happened on a very large scale. We constantly had to adapt the way we were working, and when the demands for the work increased we had to find ways that we could farm out some work to other places so that so that we could concentrate on the really hard stuff. And then, people have different styles of working. Some like to use storyboards and stick to them so that you know what your dealing with, and others like to improvise on the set...we had the latter.Did you plan on "farming" out so much work to other companies or did you have to stop at any time and say, "we just can't do this"?
At certain points when you've got all of those shots and all of the elements that go into them - some shots exceeded 100 elements - when you've got all these shots going in a fairly compressed schedule and they're all online, you get to the point where you reach capacity with machines and with artists. How do you manage a project that gets this big? So, we had to go rigorously through every shot and say, "is there something that we can let go?" There's lots of those very simple pieces of compositing, and we let that kind of work go. But something like the character animation or the ocean water we kept because we'd been developing it over a very long period of time.Most importantly, are you happy with the end result?
Yes, I am!
CREATING DIGITAL LIFE
Another of the daunting tasks Digital Domain faced was that of creating hundreds of digital extras to play the crew of Titanic. The characters had to look and move the same way a real person would and at the smae time fit seamlessly into scene built up of models, other digital elements, and live action. The character animation department at Digital Domain handled dozens of shots containing sometimes hundreds of CG characters, and as can be imagined the scope of the work far exceeded that of any other project involving Digital Character creation.
As Titanic leaves Southamton dock, dozens of CG Characters created by Daniel Loeb and the character teams at Digital Domain wave to the crowds on the dock.
This is not an actual shot in the movie, it is a crop taken from the original 2k shot shown above. It is clear that although they are obviously digital actors, an extraordinary ammount of detail went into their creation.
Both images come courtesy of the VFX HQ.Daniel Loeb helmed the character animation team at Digital Domain, where they employed a variety of techniques to make each character just that, a character. We talked with Daniel about the techniques used to create life.
For the character animation on Titanic, did you go for motion capture or key framing?
Right, for the character animation on Titanic we used a lot of different techniques. There was a lot of pure motion-capture, there was a lot of pure key-framing, and I think that the most interesting thing was that we came up with a hyper-technique that we called rotocapturing - that worked very well for us.Rotocapturing?
What we do is we do a motion capture but with a reduced marker set - a set of only about 20 markers on the capture subject instead of the 60 or 70 that we would normally use. Then, we bring the skeleton into SoftImage, and we don't need to clean it up very much. We then basically just rotoscope a puppet against it, and that gives us the poses of the timing that motion-capture gives you, but it, because were essentially doing a key-frame animation; we're really key-framing poses [i.e. just matching their puppet against the motion-capture skeleton], we're able to do it in a much more animated way, it's much faster, much less problematic and it generally works better.You mentioned that you pulled the skeleton's into SoftImage. Did you use any other commercially available software?
Well, SoftImage was our main motion package here, but the modeling was done in Alias, and the rendering was done in Renderman and Mental Ray. The other software that we used was our proprietary motion capture software.What about detail, I could imagine that you put a lot of work into getting the facial features right?
Well the heads were cyberscanned, so we did have very good heads to work with. I think that we put in a lot more detail than is ever apparent on the screen, or at least immediately perceivable on the screen. Even in the big crowd shots every single character is doing something; acting out a little story.With so much detail, did you ever find that some of the crowd scenes were too complex for your systems to cope with?
No, we came up with a technique so that we were working with low-res proxities and with a very distinct number of characters in a scene at any one time. For the very large shots - like TT35 which was a shot that contained several hundred characters - those characters never needed to exist in a SoftImage scene at any one time. We just sucked them all into the virtual scene at render time, so that would be the only time that you would have such large numbers in one scene together.At the beginning of production, did you plan on moving the camera so close to the digital characters?
Well that was a big issue for us from the beginning was needing to know close we were going to get. We were told from the beginning that our largest characters were only going to be about quarter screen height. The ended up being fairly accurate as a matter of fact.What about problems, did you have many?
We had problems every step of the way - but nothing more than the usual one-million-and-one problems that you would normally have, and nothing that we couldn't overcome using our resources here.So, personally, how do you feel about the characters when it came to seeing them on the big screen?
I think that as an artist, one is never completely satisfied with anything, but, in all fairness they worked quite well and they really served the purpose of the story telling. Then again, I've seen each sequence 500 times so I know what I don't like about them. Nobody viewing the movie with fresh eyes complains about the things that I do; the public don't notice the problems that I notice.
All images ©1997 Paramount Pictures, All Rights Reserved
Special thanks to Judith Crow and Daniel Loeb for their time, and Todd Vaziri for helping me out in my hour of need!
TITANIC DIGITAL DOMAIN CREDITS
Digital Effects Supervisors:
Mark Lasoff and Judith Crow
Compositing Supervisors:
Michael Kanfer and Mark ForkerTeam Leads:
Digital Integration: Matthew Butler (who also worked on the cavitation shot)
Digital Ocean: Richard Kidd
Digital Ship Extensions: Richard Payne
Digital Paraphernalia: Kelly Port
Technical Supervisor: Bill Spitzak
Digital Titanic Model Team Lead Fred TepperCharacter Team:
Animation Supervisor: Daniel Robichaud
Character Supervisor: Daniel Loeb
Stunt Sequence Supervisors: Mark Brown and Andy Jones
Departure Sequence Supervisor: Keiji Yamaguchi
Motion Capture Supervisor: Andre Bustanoby
Character Setup Supervisor: Giancarlo Lari
Character Integration Supervisor: Umesh Shukla
Modeler: Shawna Olwen
Texture Artists: Chris Cortese and John Hart
Motion Capture Technicians: Dan Ma and Mike Sanders
Paul Younghusband is a digital artist and Chief Editor of Visual Magic Magazine. He lives in North-East England and can be contacted by email at paul@visualmagic.awn.com.
FURTHER INFORMATION For more information on Titanic and the visual effects visit the VFX HQ where an in-depth review of the movies visual effects can be found. The VFX HQ also has a full list of the visual effects houses involved in production along with a series of annotated stills from the movie. All this information can be found at www.vfxhq.com/1997/titanic.html. To download a quicktime of the Titanic theatrical trailer goto the official Titanic website at www.titanicmovie.com