SPECIAL FX

There is hardly a movie that is made in Hollywood these days that does not have extensive special effects work. Bollywood has also started embracing the SFX bandwagon with some gusto. A large part of SFX is animation. But SFX goes way beyond animation. In this issue, we go behind the scenes to see how some of the most spectacular and some of the most realistic SFX seen in recent times have been achieved. How various effects are executed is explained towards the end of this section. You may want to read that

first Special FX

	SFX and Hindi Movies Aishwaraya Rai and SFX? In one of her more popular movies, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, SFX have been used in a few sequences. Here’s an account of some Creating Middle Earth Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is a formidable challenge for any movie maker. The only way the fantastic world of Orcs, Hobbits, Wizards, Trolls and, of course, humans could be brought to life was by going in for extensive computer graphics imagery Your SFX Primer How the SFX industry operates and the jargon it uses Flubber Never Existed Flubber was a CG animation. So, during the shooting of the film, how did the actors interact with something that didn’t exist?

There is hardly a movie that is made in Hollywood these days that does not have extensive special effects (SFX) work. Bollywood has also started embracing the SFX bandwagon with some gusto. A large part of SFX is animation. But SFX goes way beyond animation. In this issue, we go behind the scenes to see how some of the most spectacular and some of the most realistic SFX seen in recent times have been achieved. How various effects are executed is explained towards the end of this section. You may want to read that first.

Creating Spiderman



If you have seen the recent blockbuster Spiderman, you would recall the last scene of Tobey Maguire swinging away, amidst the high rises of Manhattan. Surely, you would have wondered how a human being, even an especially adept and agile stuntman, could have pulled one off. If you have wondered and would like to know, welcome to the world of computer-generated

SFX.

Let us take the Spiderman scene described above as an example. The bulk of the scene was computer-generated imagery (CGI). There was no real Manhattan, and no real Maguire, most of the time. Almost everything was generated by software.

This software-generated imagery was interspersed with live shots of stunt doubles for street-level shots, and the occasional shot of Maguire himself, to create the footage you and I saw.

What software was used for this? Like most other SFX projects of this scale, Spiderman used standard effects packages like Maya, extensions specifically written for the Spiderman project, and completely new packages written just to create Spiderman-specific effects like spider webs.

Spiderman and the Green Goblin were animated for their many stunts in Maya. So was the genetically-altered spider that bit Peter Parker, turning him into the superhero. Spider webs, web-slinging effects and the Manhattan buildings were digitally created in Houdini, software from Side Effects. Renderman from Pixar was also used. Animation created in Houdini and render paths for Renderman were coordinated using PERL scripts.

Houdini is available for NT, Linux, IRIX and Solaris. Maya from Alias WaveFront is available for NT, IRIX, Linux and MacOS X.

Rendering all this is a demanding task in itself, and SFX and animation studios build render farms for the purpose. Initially, most of the work was done on heavy-duty RISC machines from SGI and Sun. Recently there’s been a shift towards Linux and render farms built of commodity Intel-based machines. A render farm is a collection of machines, networked together by a high bandwidth connection, and dedicated to running the rendering. Specially written tools divide the rendering work amongst the machines in the render farm and also keep track of what is going on.

Krishna Kumar

If you have seen the recent blockbuster Spiderman, you would recall the last scene of Tobey Maguire swinging away, amidst the high rises of Manhattan. Surely, you would have wondered how a human being, even an especially adept and agile stuntman, could have pulled one off. If you have wondered and would like to know, welcome to the world of computer-generated special effects

(SFX).

Let us take the Spiderman scene described above as an example. The bulk of the scene was computer-generated imagery (CGI). There was no real Manhattan, and no real Maguire, most of the time. Almost everything was generated by software. This software-generated imagery

was interspersed with live shots of stunt doubles for street-level shots, and the occasional shot of Maguire himself, to create the footage you

and I saw.

What software was used for this? Like most other SFX projects of this scale, Spiderman used standard effects packages like Maya, extensions specifically written for the Spiderman project, and completely new packages written just to create Spiderman-specific effects like spider webs.

Spiderman and the Green Goblin were animated for their many stunts in Maya. So was the genetically-altered spider that bit Peter Parker, turning him into the superhero. Spider webs, web-slinging effects and the Manhattan buildings were digitally created in Houdini, software from Side Effects. Renderman from Pixar was also used. Animation created in Houdini and render paths for Renderman were coordinated using PERL scripts.

Houdini is available for NT, Linux, IRIX and Solaris. Maya from Alias WaveFront is available for NT, IRIX, Linux and MacOS X.

Rendering all this is a demanding task in itself, and SFX and animation studios build render farms for the purpose. Initially, most of the work was done on heavy-duty RISC machines from SGI and Sun. Recently there’s been a shift towards Linux and render farms built of commodity Intel-based machines. A render farm is a collection of machines, networked together by a high bandwidth connection, and dedicated

to running the rendering. Specially written tools divide the rendering work amongst the machines in the render farm and also keep track

of what is going on.

Krishna Kumar