Avid Technology Incorporated has made an announcement that five major companies using Softimage, Hybride, Pixel Liberation Front, Stan Winston Digital, Rising Sun Pictures, and Riot, used Softimage XSI to create the stunning visuals for the film Sky Captain and The World of Tommorow, a sci fi film starring Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jude Law. The film has taken a revolutionary step in incorporating cgi into every frame. Softimage was used to create of the backgrounds and sets.
The production team shot footage of live actors against blue screen backgrounds. After doing this they outsourced over 900 cgi shots to independent production houses, and 60% of these were rendered using the softimage software. The film is set in the year 1939 and deals with the disappearance of famous scientists around the world. Here is a listing of the companies utilizes softimage and their accomplishments:
Riot: Generated approximately 62 shots of the offices environment of Dr. Totenkopf, the villain who is suspected of being behind the disappearance of the scientists.
Rising Sun Pictures: Composed a total of over 150 shots, using SoftimageXSI to create the exterior of Totenkopf's rocket, along with the control panel inside the cockpit. In these particular shots, shading was extremely important. Rising Sun made heavy use of the SoftimageXSI render tree to create soft shadow light capabilities. Render map was also used in the creation of textures. Rising Sun was also responsible for using scripting to update assets in scenes, and was overall able to complete the work within a short time frame.
Hybride: Used SoftimageXSI to create 121 shots of 3d environment imagery for the film. They worked on the abandoned mine cave sequence, as well as utilizing the SoftimageXSI unique realtime time shaders to produce a stunning preview.
Pixel Liberation Front: Produced 88 shots for the British Navy flying fortress, which in the film is sent on a mission to protect the heroes on their adventures. PLF begin with a partially animated sequence and completed it using SoftimageXSI. BatchServe became the rendering backbone for this effects house, allowing the team at PLF to easily control the 70 CPU render farm. 50 to 200 render passes were required for each shot. The software's non-destructive animation pipeline allowed the artists to integrate motion captures, while using the animation mixer to create virtual extras.
Stan Winston Digital: Stan Winston Digital created more than 100 shots for the film, and out of 100, 84 of the shots included the development of rich environments and exotic creatures, which was used for the Island sequence. To create the creatures on the island, the CGI artists utilized the subdivision-surface modeling and UV-set construction features within the Texture Editor of Softimage.
Sky Captain and The World of Tommorow is an excellent example of the power of SoftimageXSI, as well as the direction and future of CGI and film technology.
