Armageddon is, without a doubt, one of the most talked about summer movies. Love it or hate it, you have to admit that the film's visual effects were quite spectacular. The story is arguably not very original. An asteroid on a collision course with Earth has been the subject of many a TV show, novel, or in this case a feature film. Many comparisons has been made with Deep Impact, but in terms of both story and visual effects the two films are like chalk and cheese.

Michael Bay, the Armageddon's director, is well known as one of the film industry's finest filmmakers. His reputation springs from movies like Bad Boys, and The Rock - two films which clearly establish his style as intensely action packed, unpredictable, and topped full of the 'wow factor'. "Michael is incredibly talented in my opinion. He is very visually oriented and he really has a vision in his head that he wants to create," explained Richard Hoover, one of Armageddon's visual effects supervisors, "He really pushed me visually, which I think is great."

It took all of 21 visual effects companies to fully realize Bay's imagery in Armageddon. Some of Hollywood's finest are among them: Dream Quest Images, Blue Sky|VIFX, Tippett Studios, Computer Film Company, and Digital Domain to name a few. The film itself made no effort to disguise the fact that visual effects were used heavily. In fact, the movie opens with a spectacular CG title sequence of the famous Cretaceous meteor strike that supposedly spelled the end of the dinosaurs created by Blue Sky|VIFX, who worked on this single shot for 6 months.

"First of all, the entire shot was computer generated - there's nothing real in the whole shot." stated Richard Hollander, President of Blue Sky|VIFX and Senior Visual Effects Supervisor for the

Blue Sky|VIFX's amazing title sequence was entirly CG - created in Houdini, Renderman, and Challice. Courtesy Blue Sky|VIFX/Touchstone 1998.

work the company did on Armageddon. Several different elements had to be created and animated by Blue Sky|VIFX, including the earth, the asteroid, stars and a nebula.

"The stars themselves were procedurally rendered in Renderman, and the asteroid was a 3D model of an asteroid which we built and shaded in Houdini. The earth was a very complex entity, in that it had different phases, different things that had to happen to it," Richard explained, "the earth was a very graphical one, and I don't think you'd ever see an earth like this if you were out in outer space. On top of the ordinary earth, which was very detailed - we used 3D clouds and ocean maps, etc. - we had the earth that was being destroyed by the asteroid. This involved a lot of particle work that was done in Houdini."

Josh Jaggars, Blue Sky|VIFX's visual effects producer added that, "each element - the stars, the earth, the asteroid, the shockwave, the burned earth, the sun, the lens flares, and the moon - were all created separately (as Richard explained) and pulled together in Chalice at the end of the project."

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