Next Limit Technologies would like to thank Matte World Digital for using Maxwell Render in the Oscar-awarded film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Cinefex magazine spoke with Ken Rogerson and Garrett Fry from Matte World to discuss their Maxwell Render matte work for the train station in the movie:
“Rather than create 29 digital matte paintings to represent the train station in different eras and at various stages of deterioration, Barron (visual effects supervisor) and his crew opted to build one 3D station model that they could alter and age as needed. CG artist Luis Hernandez worked on interior modeling and lighting for the 3D set, and digital matte painter Garrett Fry massaged the renders to add aging effects. ‘We used Next Limit’s Maxwell as our rendering software,’ explained Matte World Digital visual effects producer Ken Rogerson, ‘which is used mostly for architectural visualization and product design. Architects might use it to show a client what a building will look like, based on accurate interior light bulb brightness and the effect of sunlight streaming through the windows, et cetera. A lot of renderers are meant to just render an image quickly to give you a good approximation of lighting, based on someone’s best guess. But we wanted something that would mimic real-world lighting, that would be physically accurate; and so we adapted that Maxwell software to our pipeline.’
“Using Maxwell, Matte World artists could quickly view their CG environment illuminated in any number of ways and from many different angles and sources. ‘We could render the effect of each light individually,’ stated Craig Barron, ‘in separate layers, as a 32-bit, high dynamic range file, so we could combine and re-combine the interior lighting any way we wanted. We could see what our shot would look like if it was lit only from the windows, for example. We rendered all the possible lighting sources, and then mixed and matched them for each shot, using sliders to match the set lighting. It was computationally intensive, at first, because we had to put the effort into rendering all those different lighting schemes; but once we had that, lighting or re-lighting a shot went very quickly because we could add or subtract the calculated effect each discreet light had on the environment without re-rendering the whole scene. It was a good solution for the train station interior because we had multiple shots in the same environment, each with slightly different set lighting to match to.’
Excerpted from Cinefex 116 with permission.
Copyright © 2008 by Don Shay.
www.cinefex.com
An extensive case study with further details on how Matte World Digital used Maxwell Render, what challenges they came across, and how they solved them will be available soon at www.maxwellrender.com
