Monsters like you've never seen before

I spoke before about how regularly in films and tv series 3D animation is used for environmental expansions to scenes, a lot of the times creatures, animals or monsters will be created as well. Most of the times because the animals in question are too dangerous to really work with, or they just don't exist.

An Oscar winning performance on this the past few years was won by the team that was working on Life of Pi. (Dutch pride yay!) One of the many animals they had to create was this tiger. Usually making creatures isn't that big of a problem, to make them lifelike and have them interact with the actors is the tough part. Because you're working with something that isn't technically there is difficult for actors and the director, the harder part is for the VFX team. They need to work with what they get. There are a lot of things happening. For example, the scene where the tiger escapes from beneath the tarp, the boat is swaying back and forth, in which the water reacts as well. These are two different kind of software in one scene: for the tiger and the water simulation.
Also because you're working with something that isn't there, a lot of things need to be thought out carefully in advance; where will the creature (tiger) be placed in the scene, how is the actor going to react to it, how do we make it look convincing? When interacting "physically" with something that is CGI, actors usually get something like a mock-up or a dummy to hold on to, where the animators then can place their work onto or over.

Another recent film with complex creatures is Hercules (2014). I went to the Double Negative talk at the Bradford Animation Festival, and this gave lots of insight into what's actually happening at the visual effects department. These creatures were made from scratch derived from some digital sculpts they received to work with. The creatures had to look believable while interacting with the actors. A difficult problem that had to be tackled in these sequences: the fur. Fur and hair is a pain in the ass to make look realistic. They created a specific tool for this: Furball, to preview render the fur way faster than was previously possible to create stunning performances of the creatures.

Considering this is all possible opens a lot of doors. You don't necessarily have to work with the real life creatures (if they're just animals, and not like Ceberus, the three headed dog). In a behind the scenes video on this site was said that a sequence with the lion was already finished when they were still actually shooting the film. Having such reference is a lot of help for a director when working and shooting the scene. When working on something and seeing something is already near finished, or finished enough to work way in a sense, sure keeps the team motivated.

What I found really interesting when listening to the talk of Double Negative, is how much thought is put into creating such creatures. They place layers of layers, each with different properties, to make the 3D model react as lifelike as possible. A mesh-layer acting like muscle, another layer sliding on top of it like it's skin, add the fur which reacts in a totally different way, but it's all necessary to make the close up shots look believable. 

Another worthy mention is the dragon Smaug in the Hobbit trilogy. Instead of only creating the dragon and having it animated after the recorded audio of Benedict Cumberbatch, they incorporated motion tracking with it as well. Which sounds quite funny. We know that motion tracking is popular with human like creatures (Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean, Gollum in the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit respectively) but translating the movements of a human face to that of a dragon sounds a bit strange. They used tons of trackers on Ben's face to record how his muscles are moving when he's acting, using dramatic movements on his eyebrows mouth and nose. Those drastic movements are I guess useful to translate to give a better idea of how the dragon would be moving I guess? 

But it doesn't stop there for Benedict didn't only record his facial expressions to be translated into the face of the dragon, he has also been acting in a motion tracking suit for the bodily movements of the dragon. (literally flailing and crawling over the floor must've been a hilarious sight). 

I think it's amazing how all those recorded movements then can be translated into something that isn't even close to human anatomy. Aside from that, Smaug is a decent piece of 3D imagery as well. He has a detailed texture of scales all over his body, and a very expressive face, which was animated beautifully. Almost as beautiful as Lee Pace as Thranduil.