The 'Davy Jones' appreciation thread (Now with Photos!)

[spomeroy]

I expect it’s questions like that that stop people like Mr.Knoll posting in these forums…!

True but on another forum Christophe Hery pointed to his work regarding Skin SSS work and put them here:

http://renderman.org/RMR/Publications/sig03.course09.pdf.gz

S.

[anotherhong]

Could you guys give me some tips on how you achieved Davey’s realistic eyes?

1. In my research and reference, it appears that the Eyeball actually moves in and out of the socket at times. IE, squinting would push it into the socket, wide-eyes would push it out. Also, looking towards the outer corner seems to pull the Eyeball towards the inner corner slightly. Are these kinds of subtleties built into a rig like Davey Jones or Hulk? Are they important in achieving photorealism and characters that live?

2. What is the actual shape of the eyeball? How close to a sphere are your eyes, or do they more closely resemble the slightly egg shape of human eyes? Again, is this shape important in getting absolute realism?

3. How many control points do you have around the eyes in the base mesh? When making your blendshapes, do you use a skull reference to keep the proper volume to the face/eyesocket? Any tips on keeping the face looking fleshy? I know it comes down to the artists ability, but are there some insider tips and tricks you can share?

4. How do you imitate the close relationship between Eyeball and Eyelid? Is this simulated or built into blendshapes, a bit of both, proprietary and top secret?

5. What kind of shaders do you have on your eyes? Do you have SSS on the base layer of the Eyeball then maybe a shiny raytrace layer over top? What about the Iris? Is it reflective with a refractive cornea on top? Also, the white of the eye; do you mix in some blue or red, or are there sub-layers of veins?

These kind of things never really get covered in magazines or presentations, but I think they are so important. Thanks in advance for your help! And again, great work!

-DJ

Hi, DJ

Again…, I wish our model supe Geoff Campbell was back from his vacation and came in this thread to discuss his achievement, but I guess I could chip in for now.

1. Not much special rigging for eyes. Squint and wideeye shapes didn’t have eyeball movement. Not sure if animators would want these in shapes since they could change what has been animated by joints.
2. Eyeball shape - was realistic. I believe this is ‘must-to-have’ to make the realistic eye movement shapes with proper skin bulge and stretch around the eyes.
3. No skull ref was used. Sound cheezy, but keeping the proper volume and correct strech comes from the artist’s eyes, I guess.
4. No simulation was used on eyelids. Built into blendshapes.

[Rist]

Oh I see, excuse my ignorance, I did not know who Davy Jones was at first. I will see the movie next week, or at the weekend to see this character in action! Love the tenticles!

[HadleyRille]

I asked this question earlier in the thread, but I guess it got lost: If you’re raytracign refractions through the cornea, how do you deal with the apparent difference in eyeline between animation playblasts and rendered finals?

Also, for the caustic did you do some kind of photon mapping thing, or some hack to get the effect?

Thanks for sharing all the ino guys, very informative!

The way the eyes were rigged provided a lookat control for the animators, that was literally where the eyes converged in space. We usually had animation pawns for the characters Davy was talking to present in the scene. Making Davy look at Jack was done by putting the lookat control on top of Jack’s animation pawn. The refraction of the cornea was done with a realistic index of refraction. As a result, we had a realistic modeling of what happens in the real world and it generally wasn’t a problem.

That said, eyelines are very often cheated in films. It was not uncommon for Gore to ask to have Davy’s eyeline cheated closer or farther from camera.

The caustic is not photon mapped. It’s done in the shader.

[Shaderhacker]

That said, eyelines are very often cheated in films. It was not uncommon for Gore to ask to have Davy’s eyeline cheated closer or farther from camera.

I don’t understand this eyeline problem. Could you describe the problem and what the cheat would be?

Thanks,

-M

[playmesumch00ns]

Ahh ok, cool, thanks for the info hadley

Shaderhacker: the problem is that animators position the eyeballs along a particular line in Maya, but when the eyes are rendered, the refraction from the cornea slightly changes the apparent position of the pupil and iris, which can cause the eyeline to look different and some instances.

[HadleyRille]

So here’s my question…
Something like 60 artists, 9 months, 6 days a week (at times) … somewhere around 100,000 hours of work !!!

At what point in the process and/or timeline do you know that you’re really going to be able to nail it like this. Even hit the deadlines for that matter ?!?!?
Did you have the process (including R&D) clearly envisioned when quoting the work, or was it further into the project at some point when a turnover sheet or daily comes along that you know … “we’ve got it!” ??

The very short post schedule was probably the hardest aspect of this work. By it’s nature since we’re doing work that hasn’t been done before, our labor projections are really only educated guesswork.

All shows have a ramp up period, where you’re working out technical implementation details and getting in sync with the director on look. You want to do do that with a smaller crew and then add crew as the methods are worked out. So, for the first part of the show, you’re not getting enough shots finished per week to complete in time, and you have to expect that you’re going to be getting faster as you have more practice doing them.

A big show has to be well scheduled or you’re doomed. Small shows can survive a bit of chaos, but a big chaotic show = missed deadline. We had a very detailed schedule projection that included what every artist was doing every day and we were constantly making adjustments as one shot might take longer than expected and another finished early.

That said, all of the shows at ILM in the spring grew larger than our projections, and we didn’t have enough artists to finish all of the work. We did a lot of hiring and we worked a lot of weekends. Since Pirates was the last summer show to complete, when Mission Impossible 3 and Poseidon wrapped, their entire crews joined Pirates for the last two months of shot production. During that time, we had about 350 artists.

When did we know we were going to make it? About six weeks before the finals deadline we started achieving the 80 finals/week we needed. It was a very close thing.

[EricLyman]

I agree wholeheartedly. Here’s a nice clip of my eyes looking around and blinking/squinting etc:
http://www.synagen.com.au/images/dj_eyes_small.mov

Just can’t stop… looking into… eyes… heh, seriously though, that’s some great eye movement reference. Thanks for posting it. It’s interesting to see how much the skin around the eye moves with the ball as it’s looking around. I also noticed some eye bulging when you started making faces. Pretty cool stuff.

[HadleyRille]

Can someone tell me who did the artwork, I would very much appreciate it. Thanks

-Rob

I just noticed that there’s a really nice interview with Aaron McBride here, showing a lot of his artwork for Pirates:
http://features.cgsociety.org/story.php?story_id=3667

[peglegpeet13]

First off, Great work. It is stuuf like Davy Jones that makes me want to strive to be the best that I can be. I look at that as inspiration to become the best that I can be. It sounds corny, but I would just like to thank everyone that made DJ and his crew. Keep up the great work, and maybe later on down the road, I can do something like that.

Thank you for the inspiration.
David.

[thx1173]

Hadley,
Do you anticipate Pirates 3 will be bigger than DMC,with shot count, or about the same?

Did Gore shoot the fx stuff for the third film or is that stuff yet to be shot?

Congratulations to you and your ILM team on a fantastic job.

Regards,

an ilmfan

[peglegpeet13]

I tried to post earlier, but I must of had some problems.

I just wanted to say great job on DJ, I thought he looked great.
My other point is that, as weird as it may sound, is that I am using him as a sort of inspiration. I hope to be able to produce any type of work near or at that level. I appreciate what you guys have done with him and I look forward to the day when maybe, just maybe I can see some work or visions come to life. It is things like DJ which make me strive in school to do the best I can, as well as to never stop learning.
I applaud you and thank you
David.
Keep up the great work.

[fgdf]

I saw the movie today. VFX are amazing especially characters. I wish there ware some hi-res colse-ups :shrug:great job in such a short deadline - amazing.

@John Did you use custom shaders for eye (caustic shaders etc) I’m playing with the tips you gave and they are very helpful so far

Cheers
-B

[sphere]

Just thought you aussie guys might like to know that the making of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest is on channel 9, 11pm tonight (Saturday).

[Anthonie]

I saw the movie too and i’m with fgdf. it simply looks amazing.
as for the normal casual people the movie wouldn’t be very special.
Like I said it really has nice graphics and all but the story is really not very strong.
because of the the story isn’t as good as I had anticipated >.<

[MasterZap]

Y’know, I think part of the reason Davey looks so real is that they are doing proper color matching, i.e. converting the actual plates to real as-true-as-humanly-possible to linear-light (what is known as “Scene Reffered” color space in the EXR format) and rendering properly in that space, and doing a good out back to film with a nice looking color management (compression of overbrights and such “tone reproduction” effects).

This is a under-emphasized area in CG but I think there is nothing more important to get right than this. I know John knows A Lot(tm) about this and I’d love to pick his brain on these issues. But with my luck I’m stuck in a meeeting when he has is presentation… :sad:

Too many rendering softwares are set to blasting gamma=1 stuff straight to screen, and people do all sorts of hacks in post to get around it … doing stuff “right” in a real, proper color space is one of my personal crusades. But y’all know that already, right, guys?

Alas, Davey is an Amazing piece of work. I’m only slightly depreseed they didn’t use my mental ray misss_fast_* shaders on it grin

/Z

[rblitz7]

Just thought you aussie guys might like to know that the making of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest is on channel 9, 11pm tonight (Saturday).

what network? cause it might not be channel 9 for everybody

[P_T]

what network? cause it might not be channel 9 for everybody

He meant an Australian TV network called ‘Channel 9’.

I went to see it the other day with a bunch of friends whom are clueless about CG and none of them believed me when I said Davy is CG, I’d probably agree with them had I not read this thread. You guys really climbed out of the Uncanny Valley with Davy.

[animalunae]

SEQUENTIAL Making of Photos:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/pirates/flash.htm

Incredible! If I could only work on something like this in the future…

[davey1]

Hi John and crew,

Davy Jones was amazing. I am still shocked that he was entirely CG.

On a related topic:
I was wondering if any ILMers could comment on some of the incredible matte shots in the film. I would love to know which artists were responsible for the 3 sequential arieal shots of the island. Was the fog creeping over the hills CG? The tower shot at night was also really cool. I am a huge matte painting fan so any info would be great.

The work you guys pulled off was incredible. Thanks for the constant inspiration!

-d