http://theconvergence.co.uk/2011/01/3d-animation-digital-makeup-tronlegacy/

Being a massive geek this type of video is right up my street. Make sure to change the video quality to 720p HD.

The video shows clearly how Digital Domain put more than 40mins of Imax 3d footage together to create the world of Tron Legacy. To start with Imax footage is ridiculous, we moan as editiors and effects guys when working with footage at full HD 1920×1080, imax can be up to 12k!  12000 × 8700 theoretical pixels or 6120 × 4500 actually discernible pixels. Let alone the whole thing was filmed and created in stereoscopic 3D.

To create the 3d environments and the ddigital make up for young Jeff Bridges character of ‘Clue’ and took 1000′s of man hours and 100′s of thousands of CPUs in huge renderfarms to create each of the digital frames, one at a time.

The models and sets are designed on paper, then created in the computer as digital models. Consider creating a digital chicken wire mesh, then wrapping large pieces of wallpaper onto that mesh. You can chose whatever wallpaper you like and this defines what the surface appears to be made of. Rock, glass, skin you name it.

Once the assets are created they are then lit just as a real world set, key, fill, character, rim etc.. Obviously there a lot of tricks that can be played in the process to create say skin surface requires extremely complex materials, shaders and lighting all combined to create just the right properties…

Finally we have to animate our digital 3D. Be it technically matching moving virtual camera moves with real ones to inoperative real actors into the digital world, which is a hard process in itself with teams of 100′s on most movies these days. Or animating vehicles and characters to move correctly… vehicles are considerably easier than characters… Saying that its a lot easier than stop motion / clay animation instead of having to create every frame one at a time, you set ‘Key’ frames for movement and the computer fills in the middle, i.e. Bike starts at positing A at frame zero, then ends at position B 5 seconds later.

The final stage is compositing, bringing it all together… removing green screen adding environments, blending digital heads onto real bodies etc…

Characters are the trickiest through. To do things right you have to create an exact digital skeleton to move the mesh properly, then a muscular structure to allow the flesh to move and bulge correctly… 1000′s of controls alone are in ‘Clue’s face. Plus its a real art form to be a good character animator, just as not everyone can be a true fine artist, same is true for animators.

This I’m afriad is where DD let themselves down slightly, I could write about the issue of the uncanny valley  for pages and pages but I wont for this post. In a nut shell though there is a direct correlation between “realisim” and believability and somewhere up near the top of that graph is a massive dip. Polar express is placed in this dip as you watch it you realise something is just wrong with the faces and it just creeps everyone out. Whilst you watch Tom and Jerry and see a cat and a mouse fighting… you dont even think about it being 12fps, 2d cell animation where the backgrounds dont move. But with Tron Legacy the ‘Digital Makup’ for Jeff Bridges sometime gets over the valley… but then slips smack into it! breaking the suspension of disbelief! We stop watching the movie, stop being sucked into the film, and go Errrrghhh, that guys face is wrong and looks just like a cheap mask.

If you create a caricature or monster, you can get away with a hell of a lot more. Think Jurrasic park in 1996… or Dobby from Harry Potter… Gollum in lord of the rings, or Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean.

I applaud Digital Domain on giving full screen time to a normal human face acting for that much screen time, they did it with Benjimin Button before, but it was mostly and old mans face (caricature) and a slightly younger Brad Pit riding a motorcycle near the end. There are a lot of digital doubles / digital make up doing crazy stunts… batman flying… people blowing up etc. but straight human digital actors acting… not so much. Beowulf was pretty close… but it was an animated movie so sucked you into that aesthetic wholly.

There is also another whole post about digital makeup itself… did you know that every A list celeb… probably B and C also are having full digital body scans regularly. Imagine in 2030 Kira Knightly is 50ish, techs moved on a bit and she can now pull up a digital file of her from every age before hand… she could play herself exactly as she was at that specific age, or any age for that matter using digital makeup. Clue in Tron Legacy is the first real shot at this, its not perfect and its not created from a direct scan but digitally recreated… but the principle is right there. Not forgetting you can of course fix/enhance anything you liked lol.

Any way… a truly impressive feat though, by a top class company.
Just don’t look too deeply for a story….