Building Collosus
A couple of years back, the Yafka crew were asked to build an accurate reconstruction of the Collosus of Rhodes. They had ten days to complete the task. This job was recognized as the most accurate ever done and it’s based on the published work of Prof. Dr. Wolfram Hoepfner. “Most of our historic research is done by our in-house researcher, Ioannis N. Arvanitis who worked with Hoepfner in Berlin,” says Antonis. “Hoepfner and Ioannis’ drawings gave us an inside look at how Collosus was built. Our character supervisor Nick Deligaris modeled Collosus in ZBrush.”
“We brought the model into LightWave where we shaded it using the new surface node editor. The harbor, ships and ancient Greek Rhodes was built using elements we have used in previous projects for the History Channel. A series of displacement maps were used to create the wild ocean. A combination of particles and texturing and our own shader system was used to create the waves and foam.
The ship sails were animated using LightWave cloth and SSS was used for the shading. We have purchased a large number of HDR skies from Hyperfocal Design, who provided us with an exceptionally good product that really helped our work immensely. We used one of their skies to light our scene and used it as backdrop. Monte Carlo Radiosity was used and a couple of area lights. It was on this project we found out that using very high radiosity values like 600% but keeping the diffuse down at 10% we created the look we wanted. We now use that formula in most of our projects.
About two minutes of footage was rendered in two days, then we did the post in After Effects were we merged all the layers and added a sepia look to our work.
Polar bear Dome
Foundation of the Hellenic World (FHW) is a privately funded not-for-profit cultural institution based in Athens with a mission to preserve Hellenic history and tradition. FHW was asked by a big client to make a Dome format movie about the effects of climate change. This film was going to be screened inside Domes in planetariums. Each frame needed to be a minimum of 3.2K and the film was run at 30fps. It was to show the story of a polar bear needing to migrate because their natural habitat has changed. The story of the polar bear is presented in stages and the whole film is created in CG.
FHW assigned the project to three VFX computer animation houses. Their in-house department, another house called Cinepos, and Yafka. With Vangelis Christodolou, the Head of 3D at FHW as director, Yafka was assigned to do the story of the polar bear and its hazardous journey from Antarctica into the stormy seas through hurricanes, earthquakes to a destroyed city engulfed in water ending up to a desert.
Every shot was a challenge. Making a dome project requires a five camera rig, each 90 degrees FOV at 1600x1600 resolution. Then using special software, they assembled the five images into one that has a fish eye appearance in order for it to be displayed correctly in the physical dome. Andrea Carvey had a detailed analysis of the process in HDRI magazine and he gave Yafka advice on how to do it properly.
Managing all these files, five 1.6K and their respective passes and then combing them into After Effects reminded Antonis about the early days of the Amiga when he’d wait a day to render a sphere. “The only way to see how the footage would look was to book the actual planetarium and test it,” says Antonis. “Try to do that on a million dollar facility that works all day, and then go back and do changes.”
Animation supervisor Marco Carpagnano animated the polar bear in Maya and then using point oven, the model and the animation was transferred into LightWave. “We then used Sasquatch to add the fur. Sasquatch allowed us to make the fur react properly at the elements giving us the power to make the fur wet, fluffy, and react to wind and dynamic motions. There are times that the bear appears in all five cameras, still the render times were reasonable and to our pleasant surprise the fur was seamless between the different frames of each of the five cameras.”
The polar bear had to interact with the water, either swimming or diving into it. The particle motion was calculated using LightWave dynamics and then baked to a file. This would then be rendered using hypervoxels on a different single fish eye camera that would then be composited onto the footage. “Some of the polar bear dives didn’t look right with this technique,” says Antonis, “so we filmed some splashes on black and with a luma key superimposed them on the shots as required. A similar treatment was used on the fish. For texturing, we photographed a real fish and made textures in Photoshop. SSS was used in the rendering. For environments we used many images from Hyperfocal Design and added mountainous terrain, water and everything else required.”
3.2K resolution frames require huge textures, detailed models and a lot of system resources. Windows 64 with LightWave 64-bit was crucial in order to have the quality we wanted. We had to upgrade our storage server twice to cope with the size of the files. Our 1Gbps LAN barely coped. Overall it was a great experience, working on a project like that makes you think differently about the world. The hardest part was visualizing the idea of the 360-degree view, setting up and directing the animations and VFX work into that space.
Location
For motion capture needs, Yafka is in close partnership with the Motion Capture Company in Athens that is based around VICON MX. Yafka recently moved into a new 200 square metre loft looking at the Parthenon. They have doubled their rendering resources, and are equipped with a 4K editing suite. The new studio works as an animation – post facility but also training. “Our clients are mostly from abroad, UK, USA and Australia. The client base here in Greece is small and although there are some very good studios in Athens and Thesaloniki, the budgets are tiny and deadlines are tight. There are some problems organizing big projects here,” says Antonis. “Don’t forget we have sun all year and most people are tempted to run on the beaches and enjoy it. Very few are as geeky as me.”
