DreamWorks finds out that size matters when the Human world and the Bee world get together.
CGSociety :: Production Focus
by Renee Dunlop, 6 November 2007
Jerry Seinfeld was having lunch with Steven Spielberg one day, and commented how it would be funny to make a B-movie about Bees. Three years later, the offhand quip has become a fully animated DreamWorks feature.
Doug Cooper was the Visual Effects Supervisor on the project, and working closely with Directors Steve Hickner and Simon J. Smith, Production Designer Alex McDowell, and Art Director Christophe Lautrette, invented three different worlds to carry the story. That included New York City, Central Park, and the beehive where roughly a third of the film takes place and involves an entire city made of translucent wax.
Rendering an environment of that size using subsurface scattering would have brought the rendering farm to a halt, so several technologies had to be developed, technologies that will be covered in a paper at next year’s SIGGRAPH and are currently patent pending, with Cooper holding one of the names on the patent. An overview of the methods used, along with some other technologies, will be covered in this article.
“I think the scope of the film was really the biggest challenge,” said Cooper. There were 43 sequences in the movie and almost as many locations plus multiple sub-locations. “Every department had to step up and do something new, from effects lighting, surfacing, to even character effects in the clothing simulations. I couldn’t pick one because there is so much in the movie it’s like we had to do three movies to get this done.”
One of the things that Seinfeld brought to the film was a lesson he took from TV. When he started his TV show, he wanted to do something different by taking the camera out of the stage and into the streets of New York, interacting with locations and people outside and adding more of the culture of the city into the show.
People said no, you can’t do that, it’s a sitcom, we built a set and you shoot here. He refused to be constrained by that, and did go outside, did go to different places. He had the same attitude approaching an animated movie. He didn’t want to be constrained by a fixed number of locations or set which is a common way of building these movies.
“We normally look at it, break it down and say we need to keep to X number of locations, we need to reuse things and restage sequences in some of the places we’ve been before to control costs,” said Cooper. “Jerry didn’t want that limit to the story he wanted to tell, so the scope of the film became a big challenge from the get-go.”
Size Matters
How do you do a two-shot when the characters vary in size by a good six feet? It was an enormous challenge from a layout and camera point of view. It’s not difficult to compose a nice shot in scenes with main bee character, Barry, in the foreground and human Vanessa in mid-ground. But turned the other way around, shooting over the shoulder of Vanessa, you wouldn’t see Barry at all.
Numerical precision was a huge problem because of the scale of the characters. The bees are roughly an inch tall, so the camera must focus on eyes that are maybe a 16th of an inch. The vastness of scale broke down everything in terms of precision and the entire pipeline had to be retooled and the software base rewritten to support the scale for this film.
“We made all the characters fully scalable, a huge technical challenge just from a rigging perspective,” said Cooper. The rigging teams came up with a scaling system for the characters that was seamless, using a global scale control that could animate over the course of the scene, allowing scaling Barry’s rig from an inch or smaller, up to six feet tall or more. The scaling didn’t stop at rigging, but included lighting and shading, translucency, the radius of translucency, the bump or displacement, shadow bias, just about everything you can imagine of shading parameters is dependent on the size of the characters.
