The Triangle

Issue date: 6/2/06 Section: Sci-Tech
Originally published: 6/2/06 at 10:28 AM EST
Last update: 6/7/06 at 12:06 AM EST

Media Credit: cgsociety.com

Media Credit: cgsociety.com

Media Credit: cgsociety.com

They say the imagination has no boundaries of what it can or can't create. The Da Vinci Code director Ron Howard wanted to film a night scene in the Saint-Sulpice church, but the Catholic Church, which has denounced the book of the same name, on which the movie is based, refused to allow the film crew to shoot any scenes inside the famous Parisian church. Furthermore, the church is not open at night. To the creative imaginations of the people at Rainmaker Animation and Visual Effects, the problem of how to shoot the scene without maiming, bribery or actually being there was solved. Pivotal to this solution was a green screen set and digital compositing, but it doesn't end there.

Many digital production companies in London competed for the project, but Rainmaker ultimately came on top. To pitch for the job, the company moved a small team from Vancouver to London, where they spent about two months working on a demo.

"Trying to get jobs is an art form itself," said Mark Breakspear, a visual effects supervisor at Rainmaker. "You have to be fully invested, you have to know the script, you have to know the characters. You go up against companies investing thousands of dollars trying to put this stuff together."

He said that the scene was "probably the biggest sequential shot sequence in the film. There are 39 shots, one after another. And it's kind of a cool sequence."

Everything began with measurements and photographs taken by visual effects supervisor Angus Bickerton, who entered the church as a tourist. The team used his data and pictures as rough references. From those measurements and photographs, the team created a virtual camera that moved through the church.

"We had been waiting for a project to come along that would test a new process we're using to build CG environments," said Breakspear. "The test was a learning curve; we worked out a lot of the things that were right and wrong about the process."

Among the tools Rainmaker used for the project were Lightwave for modeling, Boujou for tracking, Digital Fusion for compositing, Photoshop for texture painting and proprietary code. Breakspear didn't go into specifics about the proprietary process the studio used to model, texture and light the church, but admitted that "it's tied to data collection and how that data is applied."

As soon as they got the job, they hired additional artists in London and put a second team in Paris to gather more photographs. As it turned out, Bickerton's feet weren't precisely 12 inches long, so certain elements weren't in proportion, which would prove to be a big hassle when matching the digitally rendered environment with the greenscreen set. With the new photographs, a floor plan of the church and other research data, they created a more accurate model in Lightwave, a 3-D modeling program.

The actual set of the scenes, built within a 40-foot round green screen, had a tiled floor, some chairs, pillars and candles, with lighting to match a nighttime scene. Rainmaker brought a wireframe model and a computer system that fed the CG model into the 35mm camera. This allowed the filmmaker to get a general idea of what angles to look at and how they would look before creating the actual final model.

Some of the shots were tricky to do; the shots that looked down from above were especially tricky. Since the crew didn't have any reference photos to match, they generated painted textures. They also replaced pillars from the set, which had been modeled using Bickerton's stepped-off measurements, with CG pillars. Additionally, Breakspear commented that they removed the real candles that were on-set with digital ones, as they "were real, but they didn't look real enough."

In the interview with CGTalk, Breakspear said, "If you're in visual effects, you're aware that rendering objects with CG renders gives you only a glimpse of reality, a pseudo reality. All render engines have predefined characteristics. Textures give you a glimpse of another reality for the same thing, but in environments like the church, there are so many reflective surfaces ­­- even wood has a sheen - you can't just apply wallpaper. You need to have the refractive, reflective, and ambient light. When the camera moves around, objects have to react like marble and wood. So, we've been working out ways to combine the two and get the best from both. There aren't many tools for that."

Another tricky part was the fact that the Rainmaker team could only access and photograph the church in the daytime. So they built a daytime model, even though the scene was supposed to take place at night. In order to get the right bearings, the crew used other churches of similar structure to get a feel for how the lighting would work in large spaces at night. The compositing team, led by Matthew Crenz, converted the digital model to nighttime. According to Crenz, the process involved taking part out of the lighting in the daytime and replacing it with lighting that they deemed appropriate for the nighttime atmosphere.

"Converting from day to night was a major part of the job," said Breakspear. "We got rid of sunlight textures and shadows, and added moonbeams and bluer environments, while still protecting the red in the flickering candles and the skin tones."

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