BAF16 - Double Negative

Chris McLaughlin, a sequence supervisor from Double Negative, came to talk about the special effects of Hercules, mainly about the creature development for Hercules. He first showed the Showreel (which was uh-mazing by the way) before starting to talk about the process.

For Hercules Double Negative had to create environment extensions, digidoubles, crowds and five creatures. Each his own mini sequence and their own environments. The creatures were the  Erumenthian Boar, Lernaean Hydra, Nemean Lion, Cerberus and the three wolves. They were provided with some material; concept art, sculpt references, Cerberus previs (provided by "the Third Floor", which was shown.) They realised they had a few challenges ahead: hair and fur, a lot of it and many close ups. Creature in the water, interaction with actors and snow. The RND team created a groom tool Furball, a GPU based procedural node based tool, to help themselves when creating the fur. They created fur simulations, v5 physical plausible shading, Fluid simulations and a crowd rioting.

A great piece of advice you'll hear everywhere: Reference is the most important in VFX


Each creature had the same kind of pipeline: the model, displacement, texture base, details and shading. When creating the creatures, they started off from the sculptures they were provided, and altered them in a manner that they fit better with the visuals they wanted to create. Then they added lots of different maps on top of it. Displacement maps add ton of details and realism with not too much effort. For the fur of the lion they used multiple shaders with different tones to achieve a realistic effect for animals never consist of the same colour over the body.

They also used a lot of digidoubles or pieces of it for Hercules for the live acting didn't fit the sequence. They used the doubles for both far and close up shots. The digidoubles (also others than just Hercules) were useful for things like costume variation, for they were easy to add in. Key thing with acting when you know you'll add a digidouble is to use contraptions while shooting a scene. The contraptions add weight to the acting. Instead of acting to hold on to the jaws of a wolf, act while holding on to a contraption which you can edit out later and add the CG on top.

To try and achieve more "realisticness" in the creatures they used a normal rig with volume joints. This way, when they move, the amount of volume stays the same. Instead of just folding in when moving a joint, the volume gets displaced to achieve a more realistic feel. The first thing to do with the creatures is to create walk and run cycles to see if the volume distribution is allright. Then the muscle mesh is attached to the rig with a skin mesh wrapper around it. This creates the illusion that the skin is gliding on top of the muscles, just like it would do in real life.

Pipelines of two sequences:

The hydra sequence:
Key the blue screen
Environment extension
Add the hydra
Add water fluids
Add water on Hercules (no digidouble, on top of the actor)
Extend camera movements for more drama.

The boar sequence:
Real life footage
Blow up a tree for reference
Add the boar
Environment extension (or entirely CG)
Add CG Hercules
Add snow interaction.



It was really nice to see how VFX really work and it was an eyeopener for me. I must say I opened up my mind a bit more towards visual effects. I was always really envious of people who were really good in creating VFX, and I have much respect, but I never thought I would be interesting in doing them myself because I always thought of myself as a character kind of girl. Well done Chris, you caught my attention.