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MillimeterDr. Manhattan Project
Feb 25, 2009 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Tech secrets from Watchmen.
The glow from Crudup’s LED suit yielded much more interesting and detailed lighting than the filmmakers had expected. According to Snyder, the team would not have had the resources to replicate the reflections on surfaces surrounding the character in post.
Middle photo by Clay Enos
“It took some R&D because we had to go back and forth to figure out the density and distribution of the LEDs, since they are really pinpoints of light,” Travers says. “They had to be distributed somewhat evenly on the suit in order to get us an even throw of light. The unevenness of the light actually worked in our favor for interesting light play, especially in the love scene. But there are a number of times when [the character] has interesting, close contact with someone and the light plays on their face a certain way. With one character [Silk Spectre], her face is a certain indigo skin tone and when his glove gets closer, her face goes completely cyan. It was surprising, some of the things that light did. What is interesting about LEDs is that sometimes the light color is indigo, but the closer you get, they turn cyan. In fact, when we did do artificial environment lighting in some places, we tried to match that kind of feel — that idea of having a hue change based on the distance of the light source. That made it much more realistic. The end result was that we got plate photography with character source lighting that was very precise, and almost impossible to replicate as a post process.”
“[As a result of all this,] I never had to do any special lighting when Billy's character was in the room,” Fong says. “We just did it like any character, depending on what was appropriate for the scene. If it was a bright situation, such as in daylight, the glow should be less noticeable, which happened naturally. Other times, like during the love scene in bed, the character himself was pretty much the primary light source. The only time we needed more than that was when we were filming the bigger set pieces — scenes where Dr. Manhattan is gigantic in his lab. When he was gigantic, we had to find ways to pump more light to match his increased size. We added more bounce light in those situations, and for some of them, we had a huge HMI balloon at the top of the room to represent the light he was supposed to be emitting at that height.”
While achieving the production's lighting goals and allowing it to shoot on location without encumbering itself with the technically heavy footprint of a performance-capture stage, this approach still left filmmakers with the painstaking problem of painting out the real Crudup and replacing him with his CG doppelganger. This process was largely accomplished traditionally using rotomation and paint techniques at Imageworks, while the animation team created Dr. Manhattan's performance based on reams of reference material.
“Normally, you paint a good, clean frame of something, and you track it typically, but that can get thrown out the window when the character provides light and is moving around,” Travers says. “Light can change subtly every time in those shots, so some of our typical solutions for roto and paint didn't always work. There were also size differences, because Billy is about 5' 8", while the character, at his normal height, is about 6' 2" and very muscle-bound. That said, we only had to paint out where [the CG] Dr. Manhattan would not cover Billy. So the real work was in painting Billy from the scene. But it paid off, because we have a CG body and face with a real actor's performance and a color palette that came out of the real on-set photography, including interactive lighting.”
At this point, Snyder, Des Jardin, and Travers all come back to the method of creating reference for the character using Crudup's performance as the reason they could make what they consider to be a believable digital human — albeit an unusual one — out of Dr. Manhattan.
“We've been on the digital human project for years,” Travers says. “We've made real good advances in rendering technologies and look development. But where I think most CG humans fail is in the animation. So we made a point to make that a clear and heavy aspect of this show — to give the animation team a guide to go by. In this case, we filmed an A-list actor at close range, which provided excellent performance reference. After all, you would never ask a master oil painter to paint a masterpiece with no subject reference. Our pipeline for judging the animation was done splitscreen, CG doc side-by-side with Billy. The idea was to match as close as we could, but with a principal goal that we would not be slave to any particular technology, so if we wanted some motion-capture data for a particular thing, we used it, or if it was best to just animate by hand, we chose that course.”
About 10 percent of Dr. Manhattan is mo-cap, and the bulk is hand-animated. The character was animated in Autodesk Maya, with Imageworks using Apple Shake and Side Effects Software Houdini for compositing, along with several proprietary tools.
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.