Hasta La Motion!

At one point in the film, Harry falls into Dumbledore’s pensieve and ends up in one of the elder wizard’s memories of a trial that took place sometime before. The artists used Maya to model the environment—an elaborately detailed trial chamber measuring eight stories high and weighing in at 3 million polygons. “Maya is great when it comes to handling huge, very detailed and dense models like this one,” McNamara says. In addition to the size of the model, another challenge concerned rendering it, which they accomplished in the Brazil Rendering System in 3ds Max. For this task, the team found the Per-Pixel Camera Map plug-in to 3ds Max particularly helpful. The Orphanage artists developed the plug-in for their work on the film Hellboy, and Autodesk began packaging it with 3ds Max version 7.

Then the matte painters handed the views to the 3D team, who used the 3ds Max plug-in to project the paintings back onto the Maya geometry and render them through the 3D camera in 3ds Max. “As a result, when we flew the 3D camera through the trial chamber, it looked like we were moving through this beautifully artistic environment,” he adds. “With this tool, we made that environment really sing.”

The Per-Pixel Camera Map plug-in also played an important role in the artists’ work on Aeon Flux. According to Harman, who was a technical director on the film, one of the team’s more-challenging shots concerned the gigantic city of Bregna and the lush forests surrounding it, all of which they modeled in Maya and textured and rendered in 3ds Max and Brazil. “In this shot, we flew the equivalent of 50 miles through and over the CG forest, and then into the CG city,” he says.