Digital artist and partner at CoSA VFX David Beedon said, “Often the shots we get will be on air in two weeks or less, so deadlines come at you fast. For us modo is the quickest tool for getting photoreal 3D finished and out the door.”

Reality Re-Constructed
Generally working from photographs, the team uses the modelling and texturing tools in modo to construct CG that complements the other assets and effects found in a scene’s final Nuke composite. While they typically need to add common elements like buildings and vehicles to scenes, CoSA can also use modo to skin the jets for ‘Pan Am’, for example, create complete sets for ‘Person of Interest’, or simulate breaking glass on in-camera windows – realistically enough to keep the audience from recognising the additions. The ability to design, build and extend rapidly is a major factor helping CoSA attract projects in their competitive industry, and also helps keep the artists and workstations free to take on new work as required.

Very often, the team are only assigned their shots once post production is underway, which means they have to rely on tracking to re-create the environment. David said, “We sometimes have photographs that can aid our build and always consult real-life footage to make certain we are emulating reality. In the event we're in the process earlier, we take a huge quantity of photography and try all types of subterfuge to collect set measurements but we know production can't wait on us. Of course, the bigger shots that need meticulous planning are a different story, but we work on significantly more shots in the former category.”

David also explained their approach to a shot in which they needed to send a tear gas canister through a window, shatter the glass and add smoke. “In that instance we had our shot and the edit of shots around it,” he said. “The edit helped us match the speed of the tear gas canister and the look of the smoke. Once we had the speed down it was just a matter of sending it through the glass. Of course, matching reality is only part of the simulation. Satisfying the director and producers is the other. Even when you're completely satisfied, they may want to change something that catches their eye, realistic or not.”

Dynamics Engine
Apart from enhancing plates or green screen footage, modo’s recent version 601 has been especially useful to CoSA due to its built-in dynamics engine, recoil, which they can use to animate soft and rigid bodies with realistic motion. For example, one scene required CG leaves to look naturally kicked up by passing cars during the onset of a storm. The generally intuitive nature of the software extends also to recoil and has made working through the development cycles for physical simulations that contain robust collision detections fairly smooth.

For this reason the engine could also be applied to a multi-piece Styrofoam monster in an upcoming documentary CoSA has been working on. “Basically, each shot needed to have interactions with other objects in the scene. In the Styrofoam monster shot the debris interacted with other CG elements, and in the leaves shot the simulation had to interact with photography. We simply needed to build CG elements to recreate the plate elements,” David said.

“Physical simulations can emulate all types of objects. A flag blowing to look natural is going to need to detect itself, so though seemingly simple it needs be robust. But we are more likely to have to throw around thousands upon thousands of items and know that the software, like in modo, will solve it even down to the tiniest interaction. This is important and gives us confidence we're getting the animation we want.”

Dust Devils
He added that, coincidentally, the shots in both the leaves and the Styrofoam monster cases included ‘dust devils’ of either leaves or debris. When thinking about how to do this, it occurred to him to make an inverted cone to hold the pieces in place. From there they could use either animated, inverse radial forces or a vortex force. In both cases the look and speed could be completely controlled and in either case they got the result David would expect, which for him is essentially the definition of intuitive.

“Set it up in modo and knock it down in Nuke – that is our process,” David said. “We start with modo because we find it’s a joy to work in, creates photoreal images and can output to most any format we want. Then we can go into Nuke and bring out the best of those elements. Utilising Nuke is largely a preference as well, but doesn’t exclude other compositors. We like to consider ourselves fairly software agnostic so will use any compositing software that is right for the job. We consistently re-evaluate any tool due to the economics of our business."

CoSa’s work features in major films like ‘The Odd Life of Timothy Green’, releasing later this year, and TV shows such as ‘Fringe’, ‘Revolution’ and ‘Person of Interest’.  www.luxology.com    www.cosavfx.com