Method Studios Explores the Birds and Bees for Kia

Directed by Jake Scott to promote Kia’s 2014 Sorento SX, ‘Space Babies’ begins with a six-year-old boy asking the inevitable question, "Where do babies come from?" Caught off guard, his father invents the tale of ‘Babylandia’, a fantastic planet and universal origin of all babies. To reach their families on earth, the babies on this planet, human and animal alike, must travel by rocket ship, break through earth’s atmosphere and descend to the ground via parachute.

Balanced Realism

To visualize this mystical planet and exciting journey, the Method team developed CG environments, rocket ships and a host of infant creatures, including penguins, elephants, pandas, giraffes, hippos and more. "It was important to Jake and David & Goliath that the CG world and animals retain an element of whimsy," said Mike Wigart, Method VFX producer. “We needed to find a balance between realism and a kid-friendly imaginary world. We knew the environments needed to look photoreal since the foreground plates were live action, but our mandate from the beginning was avoid a science fiction style.

“The production designs for the launch pad and rockets were clean and simple, so we retained this idea and built our environments around them with simplicity in mind. Much of the reference was derived from an aerials shoot in Kauai, Hawaii where the diversity of vegetation gave us a lot of ideas to work from. Consequently, the decision was to make Babylandia a lush Utopian paradise, like a Garden of Eden for baby creatures.”

The first glimpse of the environment, featuring giant CG baby statues among the cliffs, is based on a plate from this shoot, when Mike, the aerials DP Don King and the helicopter pilot spent nearly five hours shooting the Kauai landscape. “Jake had given us specific reference for locations and our approach to coverage was based on the previs but we shot as much of the landscape as possible, plus ocean plates, and determined what would work best for the shot - a slow approach into a canyon near Hanalei Bay. It was incredible, but I was disappointed that we didn't see any dinosaurs,” Mike said.

Baby Animals

Because all creatures were to be based on real examples, VFX supervisor Andy Boyd shot reference images of real baby animals and had the director and agency sign off on them before modelling and groom development got underway. Shooting the practical animals was a welcome challenge, requiring us to render the CG animals with a groom quality to match.

Mike explained, “In terms of look, our characters had to be indistinguishable from the real animals. For animation, the foundation was always realistic movement as well but we took liberties depending on what the story required - the baby panda in a spacesuit looking at the camera and giving the thumbs up, for example - but our goal was to retain as much realism as possible while putting the characters into outlandish scenarios.

“The rocket was designed by Jake Scott and his production designer, Tom Foden. We added detail and enhanced surface qualities throughout modelling and look development to help give the rocket scale, but the overarching goal was to make sure the rocket looked more like a children's toy and less like the Starship Enterprise.”

Inner Space

Because Jake wanted the space environment shots to emulate the formation sequence in ‘The Tree of Life’, the team gave the VFX supervisor on the movie, Method’s Senior Creative Director Dan Glass, a call to discuss the shooting process for this sequence. Production built two huge liquid containers in which they set up various practical fluid effects and shot them as a B-unit on set. Method used these shots as a base for the matte painted planets and nebulas, giving the sequence an inner-body feeling as a visual metaphor for the 'how babies are made' concept.

Method also linked with Company 3 and colourist Stefan Sonnenfeld, who provided the final colour grade working on the DaVinci Resolve. Because so many of the big, fantasy environment shots were all-CG, Co 3 and Method set up a multiple-step colour workflow similar to those used for movies. “We'd bring our WIPs to Stefan and he'd swing the colour so we could see how it was affecting our matte paintings and CG,” said Mike. “We'd take this and work it into our lighting and composites, so with each step we'd be closer to an overall final look, with no surprises in the end. Company 3 and Method share a server for direct data transmissions, useful when clients want see the overall aesthetic come together throughout the project.”

Tom Foden designed the rocket carrier and launch pad on a peaceful lake, basing them on architectural reference but again avoiding a ‘sci-fi’ look and keeping the design very clean. Andy Boyd chose to create the water in CG to accurately reflect the digital assets and matte paintings in the water surface, and they  kept the surface quality at a low frequency to harmonise with the tranquil environment.

Blast Off

The tranquillity is broken when a multiple rocket launch from the carrier commences, an elaborate sequence with the camera cutting from out on the launch pad, to the interior with the astronaut animals, to the view from back on shore. “The previs team at Halon put special effort into this scene and based their work on beautifully illustrated storyboards that Jake Scott did himself. We used Halon's scenes as a basis for the spatial relationships of the launch pad exteriors. For reference, we looked at real rocket launches to match smoke dynamics, as well as movies like ‘Apollo 13’ to give the event a more cinematic lensing,” said Mike.

The animals and babies manning the rockets suit up in astronauts’ gear complete with glass helmets to cope with the pressures and vibrations of re-entry through the atmosphere. Under the dynamic cabin lighting, the helmets were filmed in situ with refractions matted out. The team then rendered CG refractions of the environments, as well as the CG characters inside the helmet.

For the CG characters, the team used Nuke to sample the plate's dynamic lighting to produce animation curves representing the changing lighting in the plates. These curves were exported to Houdini where they drove the radiance of numerous HDRI-mapped area lights. This allowed them to accurately re-create the highly dynamic animated lighting inside the rocket.

The baby’s vibrating cheeks were a last-minute request. CG Supervisor Brian Burke’s solution started with a solid soft track of the live-action baby performance. Brian said, “We then used a custom ripple solver in Houdini to create the effect of the jiggly cheek shockwaves. The entire baby face was rendered with the effect, using the sampled lighting technique and subsurface scattering to create a nice soft look. The CG was then matted into the live-action baby's face in Nuke, preserving the parts of the face that didn't require augmentation."

Rocket Science

The rocket’s control room was deliberately designed for the baby world with many references to designs from baby toys and games. Artists at Method Design took this a step further with their ‘Baby Einstein’ screen graphics within a complex scenario of a rocket launch. The shot was a combination of eight live action plates - each baby and practical animal individually - and three CG animals for the foreground. Most plates were retimed or split to achieve the desired baby performance, so the overall composite was formidable.

From shore an incredulous monkey watches the blast-off. Mike said, “Production agreed to wrangle a real Howler monkey for the shot specifically for the eye detail, coaxing an amazingly convincing performance out of the monkey. Method created an element for the mouth that would make him look awe-inspired. Andy Boyd suggested compositing our rocket trail renders into his eyes so the reflection would help tell the story.

“Deciding how to animate the fleets of rockets heading to earth, as seen from space, was a particular challenge because space travel sequences typically draw attention to the grandeur of the subject in frame, such as a planet, galaxy or space ship. While the quality of the assets was more than adequate, the shots were very brief and the main goal was to convey the ‘babies’ metaphor.

“All of the rocket smoke, rocket trails and re-entry effects were fluid simulations executed in Houdini by our FX team. The rocket smoke was based on reference from Cape Canaveral launches while the trails and re-entry were more stylized. Finalising how sperm-like the rocket trails in space should be took an exceptional amount of back-and-forth - we hadn't seen that much reference for the reproductive system since school days! The shots were framed wide with multiple rockets moving very quickly with no time to show off the rocket detail or matte paintings, but viewers quickly understand the message.”

Back to the Garden

While the action shifts to more familiar surroundings as the animals and babies leave the rocket behind and fall to earth, decisions about using live action or CG were made shot by shot. But the overall aesthetic was determined by the environment - Babylandia is the fantastical Garden of Eden for animals, Earth is photographic and recognizable.

The shot as the animals deploy their parachutes during free fall, for example, is an entirely CG composite of a digital matte painted background of the earth’s surface below with CG clouds, animals and parachutes. The camera move was dynamic enough to require the foreground and background clouds to be executed in CG, and the speed of the animals called for specific fur dynamics for the characters.

In contrast, the following shot of a baby giraffe falling to earth started with a back plate shot out at Tejon Ranch in California, matte painted to look like Africa with a practical adult giraffe in situ. “We rendered a CG baby giraffe to match the adult and composited it into a largely practical shot. The parachute was shot as a practical element rigged to fall correctly, and this became the hero for the parachute look,” Mike said. “The puppy could be shot in a practical rig but the baby was shot on stage over green screen with a custom parachute rig. After the background plates had been shot, a quick parachute post-vis helped inform real camera moves during the baby shoot.”

Following the Pipeline

Method’s CG pipeline - passing data from modelling, to rigging and animation, then thru to effects and lighting - was all handled via Alembic. The work meant using most tools in several different ways. Maya was used for organic and hard surface modelling, with ZBrush for sculpting. All of the CG animals had some sculpting work done. The sculpts were rendered using 32bit EXR displacement maps. Maya was used for rigging animation as well.

MARI was used exclusively for texturing. With so many assets and some complex shading, the final commercial contains 1,662 textures. tracking was done in Syntheyes. Hardsurface CG elements like the rockets, planets and launchpad were rendered with V-Ray in Maya. All CG characters and effects elements - clouds, rocket trails, smoke/steam FX, debris - were rendered using mantra in Houdini. Many shots feature a hybrid of hardsurface renders from V-Ray, composited with mantra FX renders.

Complex matte painting scenes, like the opening shot of Babylandia, were a hybrid of CG done in Mari, Maya and V-Ray combined with Photoshop matte painting layers projected in Nuke's 3D space.

Most effects were handled in Houdini. Volumetric effects for the rockets were created with fluid simulations in Houdini. All volumes were rendered in mantra, Houdini’s physically based rendering engines. The simulations, including character effects like fur grooming, employed custom tools in Houdini. They also created simulations for dynamics on the space suits, opening parachutes and the baby cheeks in Houdini. www.methodstudios.com