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MillimeterLaw Abiding Citizen Step by Step
Oct 28, 2009 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
Resulting explosion
Image courtesy Entity FX
The type of missile that Entity had to model in Autodesk Maya is a Javelin, and Beck says there's quite a bit of data available on what those missiles look like. "We have guys here who are total weaponry geeks, and we looked at lots of reference footage of how those missiles would launch," he says. "We initially modeled a relatively low-detailed missile because we thought it would be a bit of a blur, but then production decided they wanted a better look at it. So we modeled a quite detailed missile and slowed it down a bit to get a better look at it."
Entity's 3D lead, David Alexander, generated the Maya smoke and flame elements coming out of the missile.
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"Of course, he illuminated the CG smoke with the flame," Beck says. "The smoke had to look exactly like the practical smoke that was further back in Z-space in the plate photography. The smoke near the missile is heavily illuminated by the fiery plume. And then the smoke further back, which is also CG, is then shielding the practical smoke behind it from being illuminated. We had to make the illumination fall off so that at the boundary between the CG smoke and the real smoke, the CG smoke was not brightly lit. We had the benefit, and the curse, of reference footage being in the same shot.
"Because the missile is a blur, the shot was more about how the smoke reacts in that environment. We generated a procedural particle-based contrail in Maya for the missile. There was a lot of discussion about what path it should take. The path was not a straight line—it took a bit of an S-shape. As soon as you see an S-shape, it tells you that the missile has a guidance system and has somehow locked onto the SUV. We had to cheat the location of the launcher and do a certain amount of rotage to bring the missile trail out from behind a few obscuring trees, so you didn't wonder where the thing was."
The team used After Effects for the roto work.
The explosion of the SUV was primarily a practical effect, though Entity did add some CG debris to enhance it. "We timed the missile so that it would hit a millisecond before the explosion, to give it time to detonate," Beck says. "Then we added some flying debris that would follow the path that the missile originally took. We time-mapped it so that it happened at exactly the right moment. When the time-mapping was done, it needed additional paint work so that the explosion had a little bit more impact." All the CG elements were rendered in Maya.
"We've done some really nice explosions that are fully CG, but practical explosions are just gorgeous and still hard to replicate," Beck says. "There's a randomness, acceleration, and combustion in 'God's particle system' that are so complex—and they're rendered in realtime."
Credit Roll
Director: F.Gary Gray
DP: Jonathan Sela
Visual Effects Supervisor: Raymond Gieringer
Visual Effects Production Manager: Sean Nowlan
For Entity FX:
Senior Visual Effects Supervisor: Mat Beck
Visual Effects Supervisor: Brian Ali Harding
Executive Visual Effects Producer: Dan Rucinski
Visual Effects Producer: Krista Maryanski
3D Lead/Compositor: David Alexander
3D Artist: Martin Lorenz
Lead Compositor: Rob Reinhart
Compositor: Jeremy Renteria
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.