Rhythm & Hues Fights for Realism in a Mythical War

Performing a convincing magic trick depends on how well things can be hidden, moved and replaced before the eye can detect the deception. Similarly, creating photorealistic CG effects is a balance of making it look as good as possible and then using any elements ‘ dark lighting, dust, quick cuts or distancing the subjects from the camera ‘ to mask the fact that it is largely an illusion.
On The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The
Wardrobe the visual effects artists at Rhythm & Hues were
stripped of many of these common aids and techniques and charged with making a fantastical world made up of real-life and mythical characters appear photoreal, all in stark daylight, within intimate scenes as well as the final epic battle of good vs. evil.
“With everything so brightly lit you can’t hide anything,” notes Rhythm & Hues' Dan Smiczek, supervisor of Massive Software visual effects. “They wanted a clean look, almost serene and childlike, so there wasn’t a lot of dust and the colors are very vibrant so
there’s no way of hiding anything. It’s all right there.”
Lions, Griffins and Minotaurs, Oh My
Before they could integrate the CG creatures into the live action plates, of course, all those characters had to be created.
“We had 22 weeks of motion capture, some fully keyframed animated
characters like the leopards, cheetahs and all the birds,” says
Smiczek. “When dealing with real existing characters it was just a lot of analyzing how they move in real life. We put in a lot of time watching how birds flock for our griffins and hawks. Then we had these beast-human characters like the Minotaur and fawns. For the Minotaur we brought in a huge variety of talent to the mo-cap stage and ended up using an ex-NFL player to get that hulking movement. For our fawn we used a former Cirque de Soleil performer.”
The biggest character creation challenge, of course, was creating the hero, Aslan the mighty lion, a completely keyframed, photoreal
character. Weta Workshop provided Rhythm & Hues with the initial
character designs. From there, Rhythmn & Hues further developed the
model of Aslan using Maya and keyframed it using its own proprietary Voodoo software. In all, Rhythm & Hues spent over two years with Aslan,from the early painstaking development to delivery in October, 2005.
“With Aslan, the idea was to make it look as photoreal as possible.
[Director] Andrew Adamson didn’t want people to sit there and say to themselves ‘this is a good CG lion,'” relates Smiczek. “Aslan, over the two years, went though a lot of different stages. There was a point where he looked super realistic and we did tests and it looked exactly like a real lion. But from there we had to move it into more hyper-color environments and give him more of a humanized character and persona. I know there were some people on the Internet that saw the early tests and thought it was a real lion and said it was so much better than the way Aslan ended up looking in the movie. But those tests were very early in the process and just a stepping off point. We had to allow him to deliver dialogue and his character has to exude this leadership quality. We gave him eyelids ‘ real lions down have eyelids, they just squish their face shut. For Aslan we had a particularly good fur dynamic with a lot of wind that would catch his fur. And a good muscle system that has a little giggle to it, the giggle is the key.”
Bringing It All Together In the “Massive” Battle
Creating all the CG characters placing them in scene talking with
actors is just an effects appetizer for the epic battle scene at the end of the film. “The new thing we had to deal with in this movie that separates it from other movies like Lord of the Rings is just the sheer variety of characters we had,” explains Smiczek. “The battle scene has less total number of characters than that of Lord of the Rings but 10 times the variety.” To create this enormous battle scene, Rhythm & Hues turned to the same tool used on Lord of the Rings, Massive Software. After creating a library of movements for each character, this intelligent software system allows artists type in commands and they will automatically interact with other characters.
Maya was used for modeling and Rhythm & Hues' proprietary Voodoo
software was used for animation. Models were imported into Massive
where all the motion of the battle scenes were done. Massive
scenes were output to another proprietary program for rendering
and skinning.
“In the end, Massive provided animation for over 450,000 characters," notes Smiczek. There’s a bunch of shots were you have the actor playing Peter standing there with the whole army behind him and you see all the nuances that each of those characters are doing individually. It’s those details that really bring it all to life and make it look real. It blows me away every time I see it.”