Meet the Jedi Knights of SyFy’s Defiance
If you factor in all the 2D effects—like glowing weapons and muzzle flashes and the routine cleanup and fixes customary of sci-fi CG effects—the workload swells to 1,500 effects. And this volume doesn’t reflect the many iterations and modifications they made to the 3D creatures and visual effects following reviews.
With their finely honed LightWave skills, the CG artists joke that they’re like Jedi Knights practicing an obscure religion and wielding 3D tools with mysterious powers. Using LightWave 3D, these CG artists moved virtual heaven and earth to create the new world of Defiance.
“The visual effects challenge on Defiance is to transport viewers to an imaginary, hybrid place that juxtaposes life on Earth with a strange, bizarre new world,” said Gary Hutzel, visual effects supervisor for Defiance, which aired Monday nights on the Syfy Network, a part of the NBCUniversal group in Los Angeles. “To successfully immerse viewers in Defiance, our virtual environments needed to support the imaginative plot by strategically employing extremely credible effects.”
FROM ALIEN CREATURES TO HELLBUGS
Since Defiance is essentially located overtop of what was once St. Louis, Mo. the cityscape is dotted with recognizable St. Louis skyscrapers and other vestiges of modern life. But the Defiance locale also has an infusion of Votanis alien cultures and technology. Viewers quickly become acquainted with the many mutant life forms—such as sabre wolves and Hellbugs—that spawned after disgruntled Votans deliberately detonated their advanced Ark Sphere weapons on Earth, which drastically altered Earth’s biosphere.
Could the CG team have created all these visual effects without LightWave? “Absolutely not,” said Defiance CG Artist Sean Jackson. And Defiance CG Artist Jesse Toves adds that without LightWave tools like Instancing on many scenes, “We would’ve been dealing with hundreds of millions of polygons. It would’ve been a nightmare.”
In creating cinema-quality visual effects on a TV show budget and production schedule, both Toves and Jackson cite several LightWave capabilities that made all the difference in their productivity. LightWave’s intuitive Modeler enabled the animators to quickly rig 3D hero creatures from scratch.
“Whenever a creature needed to do something specific, like climb up the side of a rocky cliff or get shot and fall over, we animated it by hand,” said Toves. “But if we needed an army of robotic Volge mercenaries marching over a bridge or 50 of them running through a valley—where their numbers mattered more than the specific performance—we would use Instancing to achieve that effect.”
BUILDING VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS
Defiance depends heavily on virtual environments and beauty shots to convey the size of the town and its geographic surroundings. When the production wasn’t shooting right on the back lot, the actors and crew worked in large green screen studios. Since it was difficult for the actors to know how to react to creatures or other threats that weren’t physically there, detailed animated sequences were provided to the director and actors so they could pre-visualize the CG elements that would eventually be added to the scene. For the attack of the Volge, a group of actors were standing on a rocky mound in the middle of a green screen studio. Pre-viz elements helped them understand how to react and where to fire their weapons.
“Because we had so many virtual elements to create in such a short span of time, we were able to import and repurpose 3D objects from the digital library we amassed over the years while working on previous sci-fi shows like Battlestar Gallactica, BSG: Blood and Chrome, and others,” said Visual Effects Supervisor Gary Hutzel. “LightWave enables us to modify existing 3D objects, even ones created using older LightWave versions, rather than always having to start from scratch. That capability—which is not widely offered on other major 3D animation platforms—proved to be a tremendous time-saver.”
JEDI EFFICIENCY
Many of the Jedi’s on the Defiance CG artistic team consider themselves generalists, capable of handling virtually every aspect of the 3D animation/visual effects craft for movies and television. And they agree that LightWave is the ideal generalist’s tool since the platform lets an individual artist access all the tools needed for an end-to-end animation project from its well organized, intuitive and efficient user interface.
Besides fast rendering, LightWave’s Viewport Preview Renderer (VPR) was critical to evaluating CG effects and lighting setups before committing to them in the rendering process. “Lighting is critical to matching the CG scene with live action plates and making the viewer believe the illusion is real,” Jackson said. Besides LightWave’s lighting and radiosity tools, the team used 3D modeling, Fiber FX for hair and fur, soft body dynamics, Instancing, and HyperVoxels for volumetric fluid effects like slime cascading off the matron Hellbug.
Fine detail and textures were added to creatures in Pixologic’s ZBrush and that data was output directly into the LightWave content directory, ready for animators to use. In addition, hundreds of live action plates and LightWave 3D objects were combined in After Effects for 2D enhancements and/or compositing.
“The speed and versatility of LightWave was indispensable throughout this entire process, but especially when we needed to revise or change anything we created,” said Jackson. “For a CG scene known as the Glyph Chamber, I went through 14 revisions of that asset within a week and a half. Sometimes changes are minor, but at other times, they can be drastic. Either way, they need to be turned around quickly and that’s what LightWave enables us to do.”
According to Defiance Visual Effects Supervisor Gary Hutzel, the show performed exceptionally well in the ratings for a sci-fi series, and has been green-lighted and is currently in production for a second season slated for June 2014.
Download a free 30-day full-feature trial of LightWave at Lightwave3d.com/try.
Rob Powers, LightWave 3D Group, http://www.lightwave3d.com, 818 861 7546, [email protected]
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