One character that hasn’t gotten a lot of notice that I’m really really happy with is Wyvern. He’s the old guy crusted into the ship. I love that actor (John Boswall), and I just love Wyvern’s modelling (Gio Nakpil) and animation (Jamy Wheless and Maia Kayser).
That was my son’s favorite thing in the whole movie… and I might have to agree. He was unexpected and sad and creepy and somehow noble. You guys nailed these characters. I can’t wait for the next one!
Upon seeing Davy Jones it just kind of fizzled out and said “That’s a pirate with an octopus growing out of his face”.
every cg character i’ve ever seen, even the very best (gollum for example) i’ve always thought to myself “that’s really great cg”. with davey, i never thought that once, i wondered briefly how on earth they made makeup looks so good and then just got lost in the performance.
the part (and this is a little weird) that really just blew my mind was this one scene (can’t remember where specifically, sorry…) but davey’s on deck on his ship and he’s thinking something over and he like moves his head a little bit and then makes a little “pop” sound with his upper lip, at that moment, i believed that there was a real undead tentacled pirate captain being filmed on-set with the other actors.
People here keep saying that they thought it was a prosthetic at first, then read that it was CG… I turned my brain off, and after the close-up on is eyes, he was simply real. Not CG or prosthetic, just real. No other character has suspended my disbelief so much as to ignore the obvious, like the fact that he’s half octopus. Which, after the movie, intrigued me a bit because I consider myself rational and moderately intelligent.
DJ was simply brilliant. I only wish I could have seen the other crewmen of the Flying Dutchman that close and alone on the screen’s real estate.
Are there good stills of the crew kicking around the net?
The pipe-smoking blew my mind. I kept thinking ‘Something’s gotta give the effect away… AHA! Smoke’ll do it! Smoke never looks right!’ Then I saw his gummy mouth wrap around that freaking pipe and blow a big luxurious puff.
I was practically giddy in my seat. My wife said it was like watching a little kid.
Yep, loved the pipe smoking part! And the part where he’s betting with the Turner’s, “Four fours…”. Loved the ‘pop’ too, that was great.
Any chance of getting some more info on how the water effects for DJ were done? I’m thinking about the part where he’s in the rain with water cascading down his face.
Without doubt that is the most astounding thing I’ve seen. If it doesnt get an oscar for the CG on Davy Jones I’ll eat my hat…if I had one. Almost makes me want to give up Cg and become a roadsweeper, you have some very talented people indeed and congrats to every single one of them.
We definately need a break down in an article of the modelling rigging and animation of such a landmark even in CG. I hope someone bought the people who worked on this a very well deserved drink afterwards?
We did have fianl concept designs and maquette for Davy, and we had Bill nighy’s scan data and in-house developed multi-camera projection data.
The concept design and the maquette were kind of loose on where the tentacles should start and end, and some times they conflicted each other about things like what kind of wrinkles or eyebrows his face would have, how many tenatcles were where. Maqette of Davy became the scan data, but we didn’t used it since the skull dimentions I was after were not of Davy’s sculpture, but Bill Naghy’s head. So the Maquette was really helpful guide, but we didn’t used it to be something we can build right on top of.
First my good part of the time were spent on how we will lay out the tentacles - how many, from where, how they connect each other.
The challenge was to creat the tentacles to be not flat but posed so we can get better feedback from Gore.
This was really demanding work because I was still changing the mesh structure all the time, sculpting face to match Bill Naghy’s scanned mesh and multi-camera image elements, and also the mesh’s detail level to get better tentacles, suction cups, etc. Everytime we or Gore wanted to change tiny things, I had to cut all the tentacles to single pieces and pose them again then sew them back into a bigger mesh that we could render out. This was to have a straight tentacle version of Davy to be blendshape-able into posed tentacle version.
So … to answer it simply, yes, it was modeled in Maya using all the usual maya polygon tools.
Zeno now have more and more of the maya’s polygon tools but it was not so long after the Zeno’s birth, so Maya was our first choice at the moment.
For me Davey Jones was the FIRST 100% believable cg character. Today I saw the movie for a second time I and again he was just ALIVE with those close-up shots. Hats off for ILM.
I know that 3D had drip shaders for surface wetness, but also compositing did quite a bit of water comping for the rain rolling off his face and body.
I had shots that required single drip compositing on Davy and background characters in addition to rain/haze.
I wanted to add that some of us compers moved to 64-bit machines and were using local RAIDs for proxies. Talk about blistering fast workstations :buttrock:
I think in addition to the tremendous artistic talent at ILM, the unsung heros are those forward thinking individuals who embraced cutting edge technology and created a facility that can support the insane amount of data Pirates generated. Not only was Davy an huge leap forward in Computer Graphics but also in the hardware/software that created him.
I think its a huge compliment to ILM that you have fooled the most critical viewers…US!
Its one thing to sell a CG effect to the normal public, but for everyone here who are 3D experts in one or another to say they were fooled into thinking it wasnt CG is a huge milestone…especially for a humanlike character.
Coming out of the theatre my friends and I were wowing at DJ. We’re all art school students and seeing stuff like him just makes up want to learn more.
Coolest CG job ever. But lordy, I wouldn’t want anythng to do with it! lol
For real. I’ve been reading up on Zeno, and the workflow/infrastructure you guys have up there sounds crazy awesome. I’ve been developing an asset pipeline around here, and Zeno’s become the ideal for how it’d turn out. Major props.
Also, re: DJ fooling everyone and their mother, I wonder if that isn’t in part because there was a distinct lack of press about him leading up to the movie? As opposed to LotR, King Kong, and Polar Express, all of whom built almost their entire marketing plan around their “New Photoreal Character Technology ™!”, Pirates didn’t have nearly the amount of coverage. Heck, you even had articles saying otherwise, that it was prosthetic. I wonder if expectations had something to do with it.
To Verbinksi, Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio and Bruckheimer
why did you go the route of making the whole crew CG? dont get me wrong Davey and that hammerhead guy were fricken awesome and amazingly real but I couldnt help thinking that some of the crew could have had make up like bootstrap bill and the other CG. The actual cg didnt bother me but I couldnt help but feeling that all that cg caused the sript and overall movie to be “eh” It didnt bother me that much but my dad walked out of theater ( he really enjoyed first one though ) saying they relied way too much on CG. And the Kraken, AWESOME!! but WAY TOO MUCH! should have had 10 min less kraken then add Davey waking up in the key stealing scene and duel with turner for 10 min or less, maby 5 min. BUT this is still the most amazing CG ive ever seen.
ILM isn’t in charge of the script or pacing, and cg usage cannot ‘cause’ the script to be anything it wasn’t on the page. If you wanna complain about that, get Verbinksi, Ted Elliott, and Terry Rossio in here. and Bruckheimer, of course.
yes you are very right, silly me, i redirect my question to Verbinksi, Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio and Bruckheimer. But ILM can comment on the issue I presented if they want, as well as all of you cgtalk folks.
Thought I’d take a sec and pop back in here and thank all the crew that have been dropping by and answering questions about the show – at much more depth than I’d expect.
These last few years have really seen many of the leading FX/CG shops become extremely open about their methodologies, their approaches… heck even step-by-step breakdowns of some shots through the pipeline.
Trade secrets and NDA’s still mean there’s a line that can’t be crossed, of course, but how cool is it that we’re able to get live Q&A with the crew at more depth than any industry mag would have covered just 5 years ago?
Thanks again, guys – you’re helping the community immensely.
