{"id":7525,"date":"2012-03-12T10:13:41","date_gmt":"2012-03-12T10:13:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.firedbydesign.com\/?p=7525"},"modified":"2012-03-12T10:34:11","modified_gmt":"2012-03-12T10:34:11","slug":"cinesite-brings-john-carters-barsoom-to-3d-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firedbydesign.com\/?p=7525","title":{"rendered":"Cinesite brings John Carter’s Barsoom to 3D life"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cinesite\u00a0has completed over 800 visual effects shots and converted over 87 minutes into 3D for Disney\u2019s John Carter. Cinesite created the majority of the film\u2019s environments, including the opposing cities of Zodanga and Helium, the Thern Sanctuary and a dramatic air battle, \u00a0as well as\u00a0\u00a0full-screen CG digi-doubles of John Carter and Princess Dejah. The environments were populated with CG crowds and hundreds of CG props.<\/p>\n

\"Helium<\/a>

Helium City \u00a92011 Disney. JOHN CARTER\u2122 ERB, Inc.<\/p><\/div>\n

Cinesite spent over two and a half years working on Oscar-winning filmmaker Andrew Stanton\u2019s first live-action feature film. Senior visual effects supervisor Sue Rowe headed up Cinesite\u2019s efforts, working closely with Stanton and spending several months on set in the UK and Utah. Rowe and her team of more than 300 people took Stanton\u2019s vision for the Edgar Rice Burroughs series of novels to deliver Cinesite\u2019s most complex and creative work to date.<\/p>\n

Due to the volume and complexity of the work Cinesite divided the shots between four additional visual effects supervisors – Jon Neill, Christian Irles, Ben Shepherd and Simon Stanley-Clamp. Artemis Oikonomopoulou was overall 3D supervisor.<\/p>\n

For Zodanga, Jon Neill and his team created the mile-long myriapod-like rusty metal tanker that roams the surface of Mars extracting the vital fuel element \u2018radium\u2019. Cinesite populated the city with an arsenal of warships and troops, before furnishing it with more than 200 CG props. The city was heavily textured to give it an industrial look and feel, and a sense of scale needed to be cleverly depicted to give the audience the full experience of a huge moving city. Timed animation caches were used to ensure the 674 digital legs moved randomly. The team also had to scale up and efficiently manage Cinesite\u2019s render farm to cope with the challenge of rendering two-billion-polygon shots with up to 20,000 objects.<\/p>\n

\"Among<\/a>

John Carter and Princess Dejah among the Thark Ruins \u00a92011 Disney. JOHN CARTER\u2122 ERB, Inc.<\/p><\/div>\n

Christian Irles oversaw Princess Dejah\u2019s city, Helium, which houses the Palace of Light. Seen from various angles and used as the backdrop for the final battle sequence, Helium has a clean and elegant look and feel. The team created a matte painting of the outside of the city and, using photogrammetry projections, built up the terrain using high-res stills taken on location in Utah.<\/p>\n

For the Palace of Light, dubbed by Stanton as \u2018the jewel of the city\u2019, the team modelled the exterior as a full CG building and digitally extended the live-action set to create the interior and the illusion of the palace scaling up to hundreds of feet. The cathedral-like structure has solid vertical ribs supporting glass feather-like wall panels. Dealing with a glass structure in a moonlit scene presented a huge challenge for shaders, reflections and refractions.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\u00a92011<\/a>

Helium Ship \u00a92011 Disney. JOHN CARTER\u2122 ERB, Inc.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Ben Shepherd supervised the huge aerial battle between Zodanga and Helium. His team created each side\u2019s airships, which use solar wings to travel on light, as well as explosions, cannon fire, digital people, a CG Thark City environment and set extensions based on photogrammetry. The giant airships are seen at close proximity so the detailing needed to be precise. The challenge was to achieve the desired look, which was a 19th Century-style sailing ship to reflect the time the novels were written, while giving them a modern twist with the use of solar wings. Each of the solar wings was covered in hundreds of tiles which were individually animated to create a shimmering effect as the airships fly through the sky.<\/p>\n

A series of particularly beautiful effects can be seen in the film based around the light collecting panels of the wings of Carter\u2019s flyer. Carefully lit in every shot to bring out rich gold and purple tones, the animated iridescent panels flash and react to the changing lighting as they move: \u201cWe could control the colours and the blending between them in real time in Maya using a CG shader.\u201d explained Rowe. \u201cThe shader changed the colour based on the angle between the wings and the camera.\u201d<\/p>\n

Simon Stanley-Clamp led Cinesite\u2019s work on Thern, the mysterious power controlled by the Thern priesthood which appears in various guises throughout the film. Briefed by Stanton to create something \u2018that has never been seen before\u2019, the initial challenge was defining what the effect would look like. The Thern effect system was built using a combination of Maya, Houdini and in-house software. Based on the principles of nanotechnology, it provided a semi-automated way to \u2018grow\u2019 Thern into any environment and geometry. It took a full year of development time to evolve and bring to the big screen. Thern\u2019s most impactful state is in the Thern Sanctuary, a huge cavern where its scale, depth and complexity can be fully appreciated by the audience in 3D.<\/p>\n

\"<\/a>

John Carter in the Thern Sanctuary \u00a92011 Disney. JOHN CARTER\u2122 ERB, Inc.<\/p><\/div>\n

For the stereo conversion Cinesite hired one of the industry\u2019s most respected stereographers, Scott Willman and built a new pipeline based on Nuke and proprietary tools. Willman’s team meticulously rotoscoped and rotomotioned each object in every shot to achieve the highest possible 3D quality.<\/p>\n

As is usual in a film of this scale, the London-based Cinesite was one of a small number of leading VFX facilities involved in the movie, working in particularly close collaboration with Double Negative.<\/p>\n

\u201cWorking on John Carter has been an epic journey for us,\u201d said Antony Hunt, managing director of Cinesite. \u201cWe\u2019ve pushed our creative ability to a new limit with outstanding visual effects, and our pipelines have been well and truly put to the test. John Carter is our first full stereo conversion of a feature film and the feedback we\u2019ve had from Andrew and Disney on the conversion quality has been fantastic.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Visit Cinesite for more information\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

View more by Cinesite on Fired By Design<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cinesite has completed over 800 visual effects shots and converted over 87 minutes into 3D for Disney\u2019s John Carter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":7546,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[157,32,2356,2355,49,2950,113,137,205,407],"class_list":["post-7525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-vfx-projects","tag-3d-animation","tag-compositing","tag-disney","tag-john-carter","tag-maya","tag-nuke","tag-rendering","tag-stereoscopic-3d","tag-vfx","tag-visual-effects-supervisor"],"yoast_head":"\nCinesite brings John Carter's Barsoom to 3D life - Fired By Design<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/firedbydesign.com\/?p=7525\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"Cinesite brings John Carter's Barsoom to 3D life - 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