3D Artist/Generalist Shawn Lipowski, the same artist who did the wing work on Black Swan, also helped Eddie to crack the stock market. Lipowski was the tracking artist, 3D artist, and compositor.
Burger was looking for an effect like a split-flap display, the old style information board still seen in some train stations.
|The process required "a surprising amount of Nuke work just because I had to do the 2D animation first and then feed that to 3D. There were probably ways I could have done it in Maya but I could see it as a 2D sequence so I did it in Nuke and just let the expressions read the images sequence and drive the tiles.|
I just thought that was a little bit simpler and gave me more control for the expanding rows flipping effect."
|The first issue was lens distortion since the shot used a very round lens, not quite fish-eye but round enough to cause a lot of distortion. Also working with 4K plates, Lipowski removed the distortion using Nukes' lens distortion tool, then tracked it in boujou, took the 3D track to Maya and began building out the room. |
The ceiling was entirely replaced with polygonal modeling. "I built the ceiling based on the undistorted plate, rendered it undistorted then when I brought it back into Nuke I reintroduced that barrel distortion.
"Everything lined up really nicely. No textures or lighting were projected from the original plate, it was all with Maya lights, HDR for reflections, and Final Gather and mental ray for global illumination.
|The motion used Maya expressions that were driven by a 2D animation that Lipowski set up in Nuke. "I had a 20 by 22 grid and the various rows of the grid had gradients. Some would go from black to white from left or right, and sometimes would start in the middle. I brought that into Maya and the expressions would read into the image sequence that I generated in Nuke with all the gradients. |
When the tiles would pass 50% grey the expressions would flip that tile with a random delay, sometimes eight frames or so, with ease-in and ease-out." All the texturing was done in Photoshop, there were no projections, just a lot of painting and grunge maps. There was a baked ambient occlusion pass to get some of the edges of the tiles to pop, and a texture for the wood boards behind the ceiling tiles.
As the drug works its magic on Eddie's mind, he conquers his first big obstacle, finishing his novel. Furiously working at his laptop as letters, words, and finally entire phrases fall around him. Burger gave a list of phrases, such as "The power to achieve"; "A dream of perfectibility"; "Eventful centuries rapidly succeeding" and "We are particles in our own whole," one Lipowski made sure to add since the whole rig is driven by particles. The falling letters were also 4K scans.
Burger wanted the letters to interact with the environment so Lipowski built simple occlusion geometry for the entire room and geometry for the ceiling to use as the emission geometry. The falling letters were instanced from the alphabet to particles, but phrases became more complicated.
|For example, if you were to just instance a word to a particle, then that whole word is not going to collide. The word "perfectibility" is rather long, and if it falls on the desk some of those letters might graze past and continue towards the floor. "You want it to wrap around objects and be interactive. If you were to instance a word to a single particle you wouldn't get that interaction. Wherever the particle stops the whole word stops." Again the solution was expressions and Python comman|
Each frame of the animation rig has an emission rate. There is a controller with a keyed emission rate because the number of falling letters, words and phrases increases throughout the scene. The script, based on the emission rate, randomly selects a phrase from the list and will pick a random polygon on the emission geometry, and within that triangle it will select a random point. Depending on how long the word is and how it's going to do the kerning, it figures out where the first particle needs to be to center the phrase.
Using the phrase "The power to achieve" it will start by offsetting to the left and find the position of the first particle which in this case will represent the letter "T". It will set up various particle attributes when it emits the "T" then will continue to the "h". The letters include random vertical offsets so when they leave the emitter they fell more like rope or string.
|The letters that are lower have less mass and the ones that are higher have more. The final product used Nuke for compositing, was rendered in mental ray, using Final Gather, a couple passes for shadows, an ambient occlusion contact pass, a cast shadow pass, depth pass, glow pass, and lighting was set up based on the light and lamps in the room. The shot was in flux to the end, facing constant style changes, finally ended up being 350 frames by the time Lipowski completed.|
When I asked Lipowski if he has been sneaking some of Eddie's drug to help keep up with the demands of his schedule, he laughed and said no but admitted "my two drugs of choice are caffeine and cortisol, the stress hormone." Stress LOOKs pretty good on these guys.