are they going to make the golden compass 2

#Are they going to make the golden compass 2 full#
#Are they going to make the golden compass 2 simulator#

“They’re not just there as animals they’re there to represent the actors’ personalities. “It was a challenge to integrate the daemons in the scenes,” says Matt Johnson, VFX supervisor at Cinesite. Meanwhile, Cinesite was doing its own work in the fur-and-feather department, creating a small army of secondary daemons that would populate many of the film’s scenes showing humans gathered. The facility’s proprietary compositing package is called ICY.

For rendering, R&H uses its own Lighthouse lighting package with Wren, its renderer. Rhythm & Hues does some 3D modeling in Maya, but most animation, lighting and compositing take place in the studio’s long-lived proprietary software, including the animation and choreography package, Voodoo.

#Are they going to make the golden compass 2 simulator#

“We have an in-house fluid simulator called Ahab that we used to create gas and fluid simulations, and we used Houdini a lot for particle animations like snow or dust or footprints.” “We worked to create something that’s very fluid based,” Chen said. And then there were the daemon deaths – when a human dies, its daemon spontaneously dissolves in a puff of what’s known in Pullman’s universe as Dust. “We have a number of shots with daemons transforming from short hair to longer hair, or from feathers into fur, so there was a fair amount of in-between stuff: feather-shrinking or fur-extending,” Chen explains.

#Are they going to make the golden compass 2 full#

Based on early tests, it was decided that the change should happen quickly – over the course of a few frames – and would be done as a full transformation of the 3D shapes, rather than a 2D morph. It all added up to a believably ferocious character that was tricky to pull off.Īnother visual that required attention to detail was the quick transformations as the daemons change from one form into another. Coulter’s apartment, which demanded strict attention being paid to fur dynamics. But with the golden monkey, there was a fair amount of interaction.” As an example, Chen cited an early scene in which the monkey attacks Pantalaimon in Mrs. A lot of times he stood around and looked soulful. The range of movement is a lot broader, more agile, than something like Aslan. “It’s a small-sized animal, probably 12 to 18 inches high, and it has a large mane. The process was collaborative enough that the final monkey didn’t look a lot like the original concepts, but R&H spent enough time poring over the details of how real monkeys move their mouths and faces to create an elaborate rig that would make him as expressive as possible within the confines of a non-speaking character. Working with sculptures and concept paintings from the production, Rhythm & Hues built a sort of amalgam of golden tamarind, capuchin, and spider monkeys. And, as an animal, the golden monkey actually isn’t found in nature.” “The performance needs to be relayed through facial expression, motion, and performance. “In some ways, the golden monkey was a lot more difficult than Aslan because, although most daemons can speak, the golden monkey never has any dialogue,” Chen explained.

Chen worked on the lion Aslan for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, so he knows all about difficult animated characters.