VEX houses journey to center of the Earth: the makers of The Core called on a variety of visual effects houses to bring their vision to the big screen - Special Effects: Animation

Post, June, 2003 by Matthew Armstrong

LOS ANGELES - Imagine this... as the spinning center of the Earth slows, the planet's rotation is affected and the equilibrium of the environment is thrown out of whack. If it continues it will mean the destruction of the entire planet. The only hope rests with a group of daredevils traveling to the center of the Earth to give it a jumpstart, sort of like the planet's personal AAA service.

This is the premise for the Warner Bros. feature The Core, which has made it possible for a variety of visual artists to create a completely new "under' world for audiences. With very little existing scientific data to go on, the film's creators, including director Jon Amiel and visual effects supervisor Greg McMurray, were free to create their own science fiction.

"The hardest thing was creating the overall look for this underworld," notes Chris Bond, president/visual effects supervisor at Winnipeg, Manitoba's Frantic Films, which did much of the film's previs work and played an integral part in creating the look of this world. "When you set out to make a space movie, there's been hundreds of space movies and everyone knows what space looks like. But no one's ever been to the center of the Earth and no one knows what it looks like. So how do you make it look believable?"

TRANSPARENT ROCK?

To make The Core visually appealing, instead of mimicking what little is known about the center of the Earth--hard rock and darkness--the film's creative team designed a fluid, transparent and luminous world.

"What Jon and Greg both wanted was something stylized in the sense that as we get progressively deeper into the Earth, they wanted to have more freedom with the camera and to see greater distances," explains Bryan Hirota, visual effects supervisor at CIS Hollywood (wwwcishollywood.com). "From a storytelling point-of-view that would be more interesting than playing it completely realistic, where you wouldn't be able to see a thing."

Using Alias\Wavefront Maya, CIS Hollywood created the underground vehicle called Virgil, which takes our heroes through the Earth, and provided cross-sections of the craft so the production team could construct a full-scale rendition of the ship for shooting live-action sequences. CIS also helmed the effects of Virgil burrowing through the different layers of earth.

To create a world of molten lava, CIS developed techniques involving fluid dynamics and volumetric rendering to show the flow of the semitransparent liquid and the wake that Virgil leaves as it travels. As the ship goes deeper, this specific volumetric rendering gave the liquid more transparency allowing the director greater freedom to pull the camera back.

CIS used Maya for previs and lockdown of the animation and worked with a company called Flow Analysis (www.flowanalysis.com) to achieve fluid simulations for different shots. The fluid simulations were rendered in the volumetric/particle rendered Jig made by Steamboat Software. The more traditional, hard surfaces like the thin outer crust of solid rock were rendered in Entropy A majority of the compositing was done with Apple's Shake and some with Discreet Inferno.

Additionally, to create the blinding appearance of the outer layer that resembles nebulae and galaxies surrounding the Earth's core, CIS worked with an independent software developer named Doc Bailey whose proprietary renderer Spore generated the ephemeral images that were later composited around the outer core. CIS used a 25-node Linux Networx renderfarm for the majority of rendering and the studio is powered by Linux-based Boxx workstations.

GEODES & LAVA

Frantic Films (www.franticfilms.com), designed many of the action sequences in the film, including the geode sequences where the ship travels into a giant cavernous sphere laced with millions of giant crystals.

Virgil flies into the geode, crashes through the crystals and shoots a laser at it in an attempt to break up the larger crystals. The laser beams bounce off the crystals, multiply and refract to other crystals, illuminating each crystal for a moment

"To hand animate that would be incredibly tedious, so we wrote a bunch of procedural stuff within 3DS Max to do all that," explains Bond. "We also built a rendering pipeline to render all those gigantic crystals."

At the end of the sequence the ship punches a hole in the geode causing an enormous eruption of lava, which begins to fill up the geode and puts our heroes in peril. "That became a huge beast and we had to write more code for Max to handle it."

In addition to Discreet 3DS Max, Frantic used Maya for some of the modeling and animation, Eyeon's Digital Fusion for compositing, 2d3's Boujou for tracking, RealViz ReTimer to slow down a few shots and Entropy and Splutterfish's Brazil for rendering.

DEEP BLUE SEA

Before digging into the Earth's crust, visual effects house Creo Films (310-315-9553) had to get Virgil launched from an oil pumping station in the middle of the ocean, down through the depths to the ocean floor For the launch site, the production shot in Vancouver and Creo extended the set and added CG water and rain to put the launch platform in the middle of the ocean. During the long journey through the water they encounter a group of whales who flee when an underwater earthquake occurs, causing a whirlpool that sucks the ship downward. Whale animation was done with Maya, Inferno was used for compositing, and all rendering was done in NewTek LightWave.