MPC returns To SCHOOL
Ian Dean talks to MPC’S Victor Lizarraga about creating living vines and shark-toothed heads in Miss Peregrine’s School for Peculiar Children
W orking on a new Tim Burton movie guarantees a VFX team are going to be stretched. For Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children MPC was tasked with creating a number of imaginative sequences that pushed the 70 strong group of artists in Montreal, London and Bangalore to create over 200 shots.
“It was a great experience to work on this project and we were very excited to be part of a Tim Burton’s movie,” says MPC CG supervisor Victor Lizarraga.
The complex project demanded some new techniques, not least the fantastic sequence in which the heroine Fiona throws seeds at the ground to summon a mass of vines that rapidly entangle a villain.
“We knew we had to develop a technique to make vines flourish from seed into a full plant that traps a character and then later freezes and shatters into thousands of pieces. To accomplish this our Assets department in London built a complex but flexible rig to animate each vine and its elements separately; allowing the animator to control the amount and position of each leaf, thorn, flowers and berries,” says Victor.
The vines were sculpted and textured in Zbrush, a rig was created in Maya. “To freeze and shatter the vines we used Houdini to control the ice formation and later used
It was an Interesting challenge to see how a mouth that size could fit at the back of claire’s head and overall how the mouth would ‘behave’ Victor Lizarraga, CG supervisor, MPC
MPC’S Kali destruction tool to break the geometry into hundred of pieces based on the character’s movement,” says Victor.
For the growing effect the team used primvars in renderman to attach arbitrary data into the geometry, and by reading this data in their shading network they were able to control the visibility of the elements depending on where the tip of the vine was travelling and triggering variation in colour. “For example,” explains Victor, “to smoothly change the berries tone based on the size so they are green at first and then either growing into red or black toward the end.”
It took four months to complete all of the shots containing the vines, passing from the Asset department all the way through Matchmove, rotoanim, Animation, Techanim, FX, Lookdev and Lighting.
vfx with bite
one fun sequence is when the character of Claire pulls back her hair to reveal a second monstrous mouth in the back of her head. “We spent time testing a tool we use at MPC to control the skin deformation by using tension and compression maps in our displacement shader,” says Victor. “This allows us to add extra detail like skin wrinkles generated by compressing muscles that are really difficult to achieve if we were to only use geometry deformation.”
This was something that you don’t see very often, says Victor: “It was an interesting challenge to see how a mouth that size could fit at the back of Claire’s head and overall how the mouth would ‘behave’. The real fun began when we finally started animating the character for a trailer shot where Claire lifts her hair and uncovers the mouth to eat a massive turkey leg in about two seconds.”
To sell the shot the artists turned to sharks teeth for inspiration: “our client was very specific about how the mouth and teeth should look, as it is this strange part of her that should really draw your attention.