Visual Effects of Ghost Rider

[incognito rider]

Hmm - it would be awesome if it at least got a nod. It'd be up against Pirates3 and Spidey3 to name just a couple. Thats pretty stiff competition.

 

[Visionary]

Spidey 3
Pirates 3
Transformers
Harry Potter
Fantastic Four 2

I doubt GR will get a nod.

 

[FlameHead]

Hmm - it would be awesome if it at least got a nod. It'd be up against Pirates3 and Spidey3 to name just a couple. Thats pretty stiff competition.

Still competition yeah but, a nod at least is warrented. Ghost Rider has visuals that have never been done before and it should be at least recognized for that. IT better be!

 

[Nebins]

Special effects were freaking awesome! Some of the best I've ever seen

 

[FlameHead]

Me too. Has any one found any articles yet praising this stuff? Like FX mags or anything?

 

[Midnyte_Sun]

You know virtual flames, demons, dont get that much appreciation. Hellboy had some amazing digital flame work done also, but I dont remember that getting any awards.

I bet you a 15 foot tall transformer will get all kinds of awards.

Se la Vida.

 

[Advanced Dark]

​

Click on the pic ABOVE ^^^[/center]

Scorchin’ Models
Modelers at Imageworks worked from cyberscans to build digital doubles in Maya of Nicholas Cage and his two stunt doubles. (One stunt double rode Johnny Blaze’s Harley, the other rode the huge “hell cycle.&#8221 In addition, they built motorcycles and a skeletal, demonic horse.

“The hell cycle was probably one of the most complicated models we’ve done as far as the amount of geometry and detail,” says Brian Steiner, CG supervisor. “Usually, we create a whole model and then spend a week adding detail. But we built this piece by piece at high resolution. Every couple of days, the modeler would bring out another little section.”

For the horse, the modelers started with a skeleton, built a rough body on top, and then added a muscle system and interconnecting tissues. “Basically, we ended up with sheets that connected piece to piece,” says Steiner. “We had to do a lot of chaining to make them look like tendons that connected one part to another. Each piece was simple, but when added together, it was complex.”

Rigging the rides was equally complex. “For the motorcycles, we started with the Harley, which was a simpler design,” says Steiner. “We tried to make it as straightforward as possible for the animators.” Controls built into the rig, for example, automatically tightened brake lines and banked the bike when animators turned it around corners.

Once the Harley rig worked the way they wanted, they migrated the rig to the hell cycle. “It didn’t have brake lines, and the proportions were different, so we modified the basic controls,” says Steiner. The horse was actually more difficult. “It had a very long backbone which was complicated to move right when it gaited, but the muscle pieces were the biggest problem,” says Steiner. “We built a volumetric deformer that was like a little muscle system, so when the muscle got shorter it would bulge out.”

A separate system put skin on top, but only in some areas; much of the surface was transparent. “Trying to get the muscles, the interconnected tissue and the skin to work together was painful compared to most characters.”

Because the elemental villains - wind, earth, water - appeared in both their human and demonic forms, the effects crew scanned the actors, and then created digital doubles and rendered them as if they were human. Particle effects combined with compositing tricks created the illusion that the wind character was made of dirty air.

“It took a fine balance,” Steiner says. “If the air is clear you can’t read the character, if it’s too thin it looks like a ball. We have the face break into pieces so you’d see multiple versions. And, we did the same sort of thing with the dirt guy.”

The main demon, though, Ghost Rider, was a special problem. “He’s a leather-jacketed biker guy with a flaming skull and hands, and his bike wheels and motor are on fire,” Mack says. In addition to matching the skeletal character to reference of Nicholas Cage and his stunt doubles, the crew needed to give the skull an emotional performance. At first, they tried switching skulls with different expressions between shots, but ultimately, they found that using the fire to portray emotion was more effective.

Light My Hellfire
“The hellfire has always been described as a supernatural flame,” says Ken Hahn, digital effects supervisor. “It’s not a consuming flame. It doesn’t create smoke. It just exists. We used it to tell the emotional content of Ghost Rider. When he sees Roxanne, the reds go out and it’s a more subtle, subdued type of flame. But when he gets really angry, the flames become hostile and dangerous.”

With a few exceptions, Ghost Rider’s fast-moving fire is always CG, a computational fluid simulation brought under control by Imageworks’ Patrick Witting. “We used the Maya solver, but only for the core calculation,” Mack says. “We built a Houdini front end and back end as well as a renderer.” To modify the fluid variables in the Maya solver, that is, the velocity, temperature, density, and amount of fuel, and to specifically place the fuel, Witting wrote Maya plug-ins that read data from Houdini texture maps and expressions. “We could use painted maps to be specific about where the fuel is,” Witting says, “or, because Houdini is very procedural, we could write 3D and 2D noise functions to create lumpy shapes or areas without fuel.

The Maya plug-in read the Houdini information and modified the fluid variables. That gave us a more direct way of interacting with the solver than with forces. There’s a limit to what anyone can achieve if they’re trying to do effects animation only by manipulating forces.”

Environments
“We knew digital fire would be the number one difficult aspect, but we had digital environments as well,” says Hahn. “Cityscapes and southwest desert landscapes.”

During a hero shot, Ghost Rider bashes through the wall of a skyscraper, comes straight down the side of a building in slow motion, swings his chain around a stanchion, and pulls himself back to the building. A courtyard in Melbourne, Australia served as the location for this shot, but the buildings weren’t high enough.

Hahn shot digital photos from a rooftop so the crew could reproduce the courtyard and using pan and tile plates. They also extended and built structures using photogrammetry. “The building he drove up is always 3D except when it’s far away,” says Steiner. “Once he’s at the top you can see a full CG city below. It was kind of a tough environment to build for just a few shots, but we got lucky because it was a limited view. We only needed to do two sides of the buildings.”

The crew also created a landscape for a showdown sequence. The sequence begins in the desert. “Ghost Rider and the old west rider are riding through the desert to the final showdown,” Mack says. “It’s a pre-dawn shot. We have a flaming guy on the motorcycle, a flaming skeletal horse, huge elaborate camera moves. There’s no way to shoot that. The camera move was all CG.”

It starts with the camera in the clouds. Ken Hahn describes the shot: “The camera is in a freefall descent, going closer and closer to the ground. You see things on fire in the distance, little trails of flame. The plants are on fire.”

Over time, the crew developed setups for the hero character and motorcycle, and for the “old west guy” and his skeletal horse. “The setups are all very handcrafted,” says Witting. “Each setup was a combination of eight to 10 parts, each with a variety of knobs.” Using these knobs, the artists controlled color, speed, movement and quality of shapes within the fire, and the amount of fire, for separate simulations on the skull, the motorcycle tires, the motor, and so forth to, in effect, give Mack several takes to choose from.

“Patrick [Witting] and his team would produce quite a few iterations,” says Mack, “We’d narrow them down, refine them, pick one and use that. The parameters were all sensitive to the values of each other so they’d interact in unpredictable ways.”

A custom solution based on RenderMan RI points rendered the fire. “You could call it a volume render solution,” says Witting. “It certainly filled out a volume and you step through it.” Steve Marshall wrote the physically-based fire shader and implemented it in Houdini. “The basic shader was a typical spectrum from white hot through oranges to red,” says Witting.

To handle the memory-intensive renders, the crew sliced the shots into multiple layers. “When Ghost Rider is big in frame we needed 100 slices,” says Mack. “That’s 100 cpu’s per frame for a couple of the worst cases.”

The clouds were 3D volumes. A big, 270-degree matte painted created by Martha Snow Mack from photographic reference taken in Utah by Hahn forms the far background. As for the terrain, the crew used a combination of texture maps and procedural shaders to change the amount of detail as the camera moved closer.

“When we’re far away, we can get away with textures and simple objects,” says Steiner. “At a certain point we mixed in detail.” The switch happened during rendering: The plants knew that when they were only four pixels big, they were spheres. If they needed 50 pixels, they became lumpier. As the camera got closer they’d look like patches of grass. And, eventually the camera would see blades of grass. Similarly, the trees grew more detailed as the camera drew closer.

“RenderMan took care of that; it has a mechanism for swapping,” says Steiner. “But we had to tell it how we wanted it done. The hard part was grouping multiple resolutions of objects together and distributing them.” For that, the crew used proprietary systems - a new script to package the multiple-resolution objects into containers that knew how to switch levels of detail, and an in-house system called “GET” to distribute the objects. “We could tell GET we wanted 10% bushes and 90% tall grass,” he says.

Can those "flash" pics be changed into GIF's??? Puhhhleassee! Click on the first link to see the story. There are TWO pages with 2 AWESOME flash pics showing the tranformation. I had no idea how much of that film was CGI. The whole damn building GR was ontop of???? I thought the top was a set. LOL

 

[Demon Within]

A+ for GR effects. Only guy I want back for GR2.

 

[FlameHead]

Just got this heads up in my google alerts:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=466456

Hi there,

To coincide with the cinema release of GhostRider, CGSociety took the opportunity to visit Sony Imageworks, and Kevin Mack. His team created the skeletal Ghost Rider demon, built and animated his hell cycle, and set both on fire. Together with CafeFX and Digital Dream, they have developed a whole new way of generating digital fire. Later in the week, you can quiz Kevin Mack yourself on our special 'Meet the Artist' thread on CGTalk.

 

[Vartha]

Cool, wonder if those improovments will be used in computor programs in the future?

 

[Advanced Dark]

Wait a sec Retro posted a visual effects article (didn't realize it) but it seems awfully similar.

http://www.superherohype.com/forums/showthread.php?t=266241

They actually seem different with the same pics.

Flamehead I think these are two different stories? I can't tell but they look similar. Merge mine into Retro's if it's different.

 

[Advanced Dark]

Retro is this the same? It looks different alot different but then the same pics...sorta. Some are different.

http://www.superherohype.com/forums/showthread.php?t=266241

Flamehead merge the above thread into Retro's.

 

[Advanced Dark]

Click on the pics for some clips.

From VFXWORLD:

Source: http://www.vfxworld.com/?atype=articles&id=3178
http://www.vfxworld.com/?atype=articles&id=3178&page=2

Those gifs are GREAT avatars on myspace. Just put 2 on my account.

 

[FlameHead]

Done.

 

[Advanced Dark]

Thanks I see how you worked it in there. You know your google alert post...you have to click on the picture to see the whole article I posted above FH. LOL

 

[Mr Nick]

Those animated images were fantastic. Great find.

 

[THE MR. TERRIFIC]

I thought the effects were really good. I was surprised with this movie! With MSJ directing Daredevil and all, I was a little worried.

 

[FlameHead]

Thanks I see how you worked it in there. You know your google alert post...you have to click on the picture to see the whole article I posted above FH. LOL

I know. That post I posted was here before the merge.

 

[3 Dev Adam]

 

[webhead731]

Nice find!

 

[Advanced Dark]

Already posted in Retroman's F/X thread. I posted it 2 or 3 days ago. It is cool though.

It's here: http://www.superherohype.com/forums/showpost.php?p=11245254&postcount=23

 

[Warhammer]

SFX were truly amazing!

 

[The Kid]

On a technical level, yes but what's fascinating to me is how perceptions have changed of visual fx.

King kong, lotr, prequel star wars movies, pirates of the carribean, that's prettymuch as good as it'll ever get fx-wise so I think kids today are so used to seeing excellent fx, something like Star Wars wouldn't amaze them like it amazed us old geezers on the board. Whats most amazing to me in GR is not how well done the cgi is, but how long the shots of the flaming skull last and how perfectly seamless the shots are blended with the actor to fool us into thinking it's real. Many comic films I've watched have rubbery unrealistic cgi segments that pull me out of the film. Here the cgi's so good, people in the theater were thinking nic cages abs weren't real or eva mendes' boobs were given a lift... when years ago they wouldn't think so.

History, fascinating subject. I'll major in it at college.

 

[Upset Spideyfan]

I found the CGI to be inconsistent, sometimes it was really amazing (like the police chase) and other times it wasn't so hot. I guess that's to be expected when you don't have a million jillion dollars (King Kong, LoTR)

 

[Advanced Dark]

LOTR had many flaws in the F/X and they were far from seamless. Same with King Kong and the stupid pole vaulting tribesman.