25-story tall robot fights giant monsters. It combines elements that are shared by machine fans and monster fans. It is a huge movie that many people are looking forward to. Maybe many people don't know that there are contributions from a group of special effects teams from China behind the scenes. Fortunately to participate in such a movie, in addition to improving my own production ability, but also fulfilling the dream of a passionate youth. In "Pacific Rim", I am mainly responsible for leading the environment and materials department to complete the work that Industrial Light & Magic Company has delivered to us. This is a huge challenge. On the one hand, we need to obtain information provided by the director and customers in a timely manner and be accurate. To understand the effect they want, on the one hand, at the technical level, we have completely surpassed previous experience.
In terms of material, we mainly made the texture of the machine clock and the big foot texture of the repair shop.
Although the background of the film is a high-tech era, the film is full of awkward elements of the steam age. This may be the style that the director likes, and it has a feeling similar to Hayao Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle". The machine clock is used to calculate the time of the last monster attack. Each number is composed of a separate panel, which is physically flipped every minute and every second. We made basic textures. The biggest difficulty was to make different panel materials for each number. The numbers and scratches on each panel were required to be different. That is to say, for those numbers, we made hundreds of them. Stickers.
One foot of the robot is enough to squash a person like an ant, and accuracy is the biggest difficulty we encounter when making bigfoot maps. There is no shortage of close-up shots. To express such a huge metal object, we must accurately grasp the size of the texture details on the feet. When people pass by the big feet, the proportions will not appear strange, and we must also highlight the robot as much as possible. Huge.
In terms of the digital background and environment, our work is even more difficult.
Since the accuracy of rendering assets cannot meet the requirements of all scene lenses from all angles, the first thing we need to do is to retouch each lens with insufficient accuracy, which is a huge workload. For example, close-up shots of big hands and big feet, the compositing department will use existing assets to synthesize. When they have completed the rough effect, they will send a single frame back to the digital background and environment department, and we will draw the details. When the effect is confirmed, we will send the sequence of the drawn layers back to the composition and let them add new details. This process will keep going back and forth until the final effect is passed.
The more tedious work is to make backgrounds for a large number of green screens. Industrial Light and Magic also gives us a lot of freedom. We can design and make backgrounds for many lenses independently. Industrial Light & Magic sent assets of our base scenes. In many cases, we can use existing assets to recombine, skip the lighting department and directly render the sequence to the compositing department by the environment department. This reduces the process and makes it very fast. Complete the background of some of the shots that are not the most important.
Among the several shots of my independent production environment, the more important ones are the loccent of the elevator field and the appearance of the control room.
There are several scenes of the elevator sliding through the elevator shaft in the movie, explaining the process of the character getting down from the parking lot on the roof to the base shatterdome. This scene is completely designed by myself. The customer likes the effect of light and shadow changes when the elevator slides through the lights in the elevator shaft. I used dozens of lights for the scene, and finally the customer is satisfied. Due to the heavy rain on the roof, the biggest difficulty is to increase the effect of water accumulation on the elevator roof. After many tests, it is still difficult to achieve the real effect. I remember that when I encountered a bottleneck, Uncle Nike (CG director) always splashed mineral water on the ground for me to observe. But in fact, there are both stagnant water and black oil on the elevator roof. They have different reflection effects. It took me a lot of time to balance this effect. Finally, I also made simple animations and volumetric light effects for the fans in the elevator shaft. The special effects department also added some water dripping from above to make the whole picture rich and layered.
The appearance of the control room appears in only a few shots made by us in the movie, so the customer also gave us a relatively large degree of freedom. The control room is in the shape of an inverted trapezoid. Based on the actual shots, I performed an extension of the scene in the control room. Customers are more sensitive to the perception of light. We must grasp the volume of the scene and place each light in a position that is beneficial to the effect. One of the lens cameras needs to be pulled from the control room to a far outside place, and the flash from the robot also has a great impact on the light and shadow of the environment. I first made a basic light environment for the composition, and also made a light layer to simulate the effects of flash. When the robot and the scene were finally put together, these sets of shots performed perfectly, very dazzling.
In the production of industrial light and magic projects, it often took a lot of effort to produce a good lens, but was ruthlessly castrated by the director. But this is work. In order to give the audience the most perfect enjoyment, we will make choices. This project has a milestone significance for Base-FX. It proves that we have the ability to complete such arduous tasks and lay a solid foundation for the more arduous tasks in the future.
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