Armed with The Foundry’s Nuke compositing software, Image Engine was the lead VFX vendor on District 9 - the debut feature from director Neill Blomkamp. The Vancouver-based VFX studio completed 311 shots on the film, which grossed $130m worldwide in its first five weeks. The quality of the work was such that Blomkamp declared, “Image Engine has done absolutely top tier, brilliant work that far exceeded my expectations.” The VFX workload focussed the studio’s efforts on creating digital aliens that populate an area of Soweto, South Africa, known as “District 9”. In addition, Image Engine developed the alien mother ship, digital helicopters and digital Casspir troop carriers as well as miscellaneous shots that required computer-generated gore.
Blomkamp approached Image Engine because of thier strong film visual effects pipeline, highly-regarded R&D department, and complex creature experience on projectss including Slither and Kingdom Hospital. VFX for The Incredible Hulk, Watchmen The Orphan, and Law Abiding Citizen also feature amongst the company’s motion picture credits, and were all completed using Nuke.
“In show business the deadline is always yesterday,” says compositing supervisor Shervin Shoghian. “But Nuke is fast, which helped our artists spend more time being creative and less time waiting for renders. Along with its advanced 3D compositing capabilities, which allowed us to do more, Nuke also proved a huge help in getting conceptual work done and addressing the director’s ongoing requests quickly.” Image Engine acquired Nuke in 2007. It currently has 49 Nuke GUI licenses and over 100 render licenses all running on Linux, apart from a very small number operating on Mac for legacy reasons. Most of the VFX work on District 9 was completed in Nuke at 2K (2048 x 1152) at 1.77:1 aspect ratio, with around 10% completed at 4K (4096 x 2048), enabling the director to pan across and zoom into certain plates. “We used to be a Shake-based company, but we’re now fully-converted to Nuke,” says Shoghian. “It is so versatile, and no other application comes close in performance or features. Nuke’s 3D workspace is the new paradigm for comping today and into the future. Other systems are either archaic, not nearly as fast as Nuke, don’t run on Linux, or are generally way more expensive and much less flexible.
“Essentially for us, Shake’s timeframe was up. It wasn’t capable of doing the level of VFX we wanted to do, and not capable of integrating into a modern pipeline. Furthermore, our artists wanted a more robust toolkit. So when The Foundry took over Nuke, we decided to jump on the bandwagon early and enjoy the journey with them.”
Image Engine deploys Nuke from the start to the end of its VFX pipeline – from the raw VFX plates right through to the final DPX render – and at multiple stages in between, as Shoghian explains. “We use Nuke to undistort and degrain the original image plates to make clean plates ready for post. We use it exclusively for compositing, and regularly import 3D cameras, geometry and EXR renders from our CG systems via FBX. Our lighters use Nuke too to relight CG elements and quickly render out ‘slap comps’ to check work-in-progress. Nuke is also integrated as a frame buffer, so we use it as a viewing tool and export full resolution DPX scenes via Truelight LUTs to watch calibrated dailies with the director in our theatre. We also finish every shot in Nuke by regraining and applying a balancing colour grade. It’s a multi-purpose application.
“One other important feature is that, because of Nuke’s open architecture, our team can write code and develop Gizmos to help with a range of VFX tasks,” he adds. A key part of Image Engine’s work on District 9 involved the removal of stand-in actors from selected takes to create clean plates ready for the compositing of the CG aliens. This was complicated by the fact that the cameras were often handheld. Using Nuke’s 3D workspace, the team was able to construct what Shoghian describes as a “3-dimensional virtual set” of each scene. 3D tracking and camera data from the selected plates was imported into Nuke, along with precision HDR photographic stills of the original location sets, plus reference plates without any actors and the selected live action takes with the stand-ins.
“By projecting the various HDR stills and plates on to cards, we were able to construct a 3D plate in Nuke,” he explains. “As there was no motion control used on the live action, the camera passes often did not match, but because of the array of elements we were working with, plus tools to warp and stretch images in Nuke, we were able to create seamless joins. We then used Nuke’s tracking and roto tools to remove the stand-ins from the scene, and make the plate ready for CG comping.
“Before Nuke, doing all of this would have involved laborious and hugely time-consuming hand, eye and 2D tracking, pasting stills on to plates, trying to cheat motion blur, depth-of-field and parallax effects, as well as rotoscoping elements back over top and underneath the CG and live action.
“But in Nuke’s 3D environment the fact that you’re working in Z-depth and have multiple cameras around the scene, you get so much for free – motion blur, parallax, depth-of-field. So long as you have nicely tracked cameras to begin with, then the sky’s the limit. Also, you can degrain at the start, regrain at the end, and then render out to DPX.”
With the plates made-ready, the task at hand was how to composite the CG aliens with efficiency. To speed the process Image Engine’s R&D team developed a Nuke Gizmo capable of auto-assembling the multiple Maya CG and 3D Delight render passes of the aliens – such as diffuse, specular, sub-surface, preference, position, RGB, shadow and occlusion passes – all to pre-scripted colour standards. With the aliens pre-built and pre-graded courtesy of the Gizmo, the lighters were able to focus on the art relighting in Nuke, adding point and spotlights and adjusting their qualities.
“This meant we could easily react to the director’s requests to adjust the way an alien shone, or to finesse the gamma, brightness and specularity of selected areas of each alien. On a practical level it was a highly-efficient and productive way to work. We could quickly make nuanced changes and view the results in Nuke, rather than going back into Maya to make changes and waiting for new renders to appear. This alleviated the pressure on our CG and lighting teams, and was fundamental to delivering convincing results.”
As for getting the VFX team up to speed on Nuke, Shoghian says, “Most, if not all, of our artists come from Fusion or Shake backgrounds. Once you give them a good lesson as to the general working principals of Nuke, they are well on their way to comping shots. Typically, if the artists understand the foundations of compositing, it’s just a matter of finding the button in Nuke, and the GUI helps the artists find their way around it. Furthermore these same artists love Nuke so much that often they only want to work on a Nuke show or pipelines in the future, so training artists on Nuke has been an easy process.” Shoghian says the decision to join the Nuke bandwagon has paid off. “The Foundry keeps upgrading Nuke and adding new features all the time. We’ve been very impressed with Nuke 5.2 – the improved Python capabilities, support for Red RAW footage and metadata are fantastic innovations that are making us look at how we can work more efficiently. We’re really excited about the next generations of Nuke too. Who would have thought there would be 3D tracking in NukeX 6.0? Not to mention lens warping and distortion tools?
“I’d love to see The Foundry sell tons of Nukes,” he concludes. “They are inventive and excited about their product, and that’s really good news from a user’s point of view. Unlike most other manufacturers, The Foundry listens to artists and develops accordingly. Unlike other comping software out there, Nuke really is based on what digital artists want and need.”