当前位置 :RSP Uses SOFTIMAGE|XSI for photorealistic weaponry, such as slicing swords, shooting stars and ninja neck wounds. XSI is also used extensively for versioning animation, constraint rigs and more in this film starring Tom Cruise.
Long before Tom Cruise agreed to star in director Edward Zwick’s heroic, melancholy, action-packed epic The Last Samurai, VFX supervisor Jeff Okun was already hard at work. Set in Japan when the modern world declares war on an ancient culture, the film required an elegant, yet often grisly look:
“I’ve known Ed for a long time,” says Okun who, after working with the legendary designer Saul Bass, began by creating titles for Zwick’s films and television shows together with his titles partner, Kathy Broyles. “The Last Samurai was such an awesome script that I just couldn’t turn it down. Back in the spring of 2001, we set to work trying to get the film to look like Ed wanted. From the beginning, we agreed that if anybody looked at any effects scene in the movie and said ‘what a great shot,’ then the effects shot would have ruined the film. The last thing Ed wanted was for the violence to appear attractive in any way.”
For a film like The Last Samurai to look real, it would have to look bloody. Contrary to the popular belief of many contemporary moviegoers, it often takes considerably more than a single slice of a glittering blade to vanquish your adversary once and for all. Sometimes they keep fighting. Sometimes, they writhe and moan through a horribly slow and painful death. Put simply, the world of swords, arrows, throwing stars and lethal darts is usually a messy one. Striving for an unparalleled level of realistic gore but (thankfully) unwilling to sacrifice any flesh-and-blood extras, Okun turned to Sydney’s Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) for help. As they so often do, RSP geared up for excitement and fired up SOFTIMAGE®|XSI®.
“From the beginning, our overall strategy at RSP has been to focus on our relationship with key supervisors and redefine visual effects delivery for them,” says Didier Elzinga, Head of VFX at RSP. “Jeff was the first supervisor we worked with on Red Planet back in 2000. Jeff always told us we would have work on his next film. That’s the way we like to work best. When supervisors we work for come to know and trust us and, hopefully, rely on us, we’re doing our job.”
And what a job they did.
NINJA NECK WOUND
For those of you who rolled your eyes at the words “Ninja” in the title above, bear with me. This ain’t Jackie Chan and a bunch of guys in black pyjamas. This is the real thing.
In the film, Cruise plays Nathan Algren, a heroic, alcoholic American soldier haunted by his past. Down on his luck, Algren accepts a job training a newly modernized Japanese army to fight the relentlessly honorable, but entirely outgunned Samurai, few of whom remain in the new Japan. Following a calamitous first battle, Algren is captured and taken to a Samurai village headed by Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe). Slowly but surely, Algren comes to appreciate, then prefer, and finally embrace the ways of the Samurai and befriends their leader. Just as he is doing so, however, a slew of government-paid Ninjas arrive to assassinate Katsumoto. From the time the first throwing star is hurled through the darkness, things turn very ugly.
“It’s an exciting, brutal and rather gruesome sequence,” says Tim Crosbie, VFX Supervisor at RSP. “The fighting is so intense and at such close quarters that it was far too dangerous to have people running around with large swords, shooting arrows and throwing darts and stars. For that reason, we made heavy use of SOFTIMAGE|XSI to create and animate photorealistic weapons that are wielded in the fight sequences.”
In one particularly memorable instance, a throwing star slices into the neck of one of the Samurai. Just to impress the sheer savagery of such a wound upon our viewing eyes, the camera tracks neatly into the gaping wound. It is definitely real…but, just as definitely, is not. RSP neatly removed the rubber prosthetic worn by the actor and returned a perfect replica of his neck to his shoulders. The razor-sharp star is, therefore, actually in the actor’s neck, if only digitally.
Another equally challenging scene sees Algren yanking a bloody sword from the impaled back of one of the Ninjas. In fact, Cruise mimed the whole scene, the bloody sword being added later by the RSP team. The tremendous quality of the work is due, at least in part, to RSP’s natural and consistent enthusiasm both for the project and for the work they do. Says Crosbie:
“As usual, the guys here were very eager to get going, so a lot of the modeling and lighting for the swords and some other weapons was entirely completed within the first couple of days after receiving the initial scans. The whole 3D process went incredibly smoothly and SOFTIMAGE| XSI did exactly what we wanted and needed it to do. Our artists are now more convinced than ever about the benefits of SOFTIMAGE|XSI.”
SAMURAXSI
“We started RSP using SOFTIMAGE|3D version 3.7, so using SOFTIMAGE|XSI was a natural progression for us,” says Elzinga by way of explanation. “It’s a very natural tool and, particularly on The Last Samurai, we were able to turn around shots extremely quickly. That speed was a great help, as we needed to be able to do a good deal of experimentation to provide Jeff with as many variations as possible. The workflow and interface enable our animators to be very, very fast indeed, and on each successive project, we discover how much further we can push the integrated mental ray® renderer.”
For Ben Paschke, Lead 3D Animator at RSP, SOFTIMAGE|XSI’s unique scripting capabilities were of particular benefit on The Last Samurai:
“For The Last Samurai, the most useful thing we built was a relatively simple track point importer,” he explains wryly. “For the shots that required our digital weapons to protrude from a wound, our track importer enabled us to stick our weapons to certain spots on the footage very quickly and easily, before adding some hand animation to finish things off. Grabbing three or four tracks from the footage also let us derive some rotation information, so we had a procedural way of generating most of the animation in a very small amount of time. It wasn’t quite 3D tracking, but because we were only adding relatively small bits of 3D onto the footage, perspective wasn’t a great concern. Since then, we use that importing tool all the time. I’d have to say that has been my favorite scripting experience.”
Asked for his favorite feature of SOFTIMAGE|XSI, Paschke begins by agreeing with Elzinga about the ever-popular SOFTIMAGE|XSI rendering:
“The integration of the renderer into the workspace makes it the absolute best choice for us,” he concurs. “It is so easy to play around with new looks or solutions to speed the composite of our 3D elements. It’s so easy, in fact, that for some of the shots where our preset shaders weren’t working the way we wanted, we were able to discard them and create solutions entirely from scratch. We also find the SOFTIMAGE|XSI Animation Mixer indispensable for versioning animation. Saving out animation into actions before revising a new version lets us keep the entire history of the animation of the shot within the scene. On The Last Samurai, we were able to transfer tracks directly to XSI, then use the Animation Mixer to mix and animate the constraint rigs into which we plugged the newly-created digital weapons.”
“RSP is phenomenal,” says Okun. “I knew they’d do a great job on the Ninja sequence, but the work they did was so good and so fast that I ended up giving them a lot more to do. Towards the end of the movie, there is a scene in which Algren’s hand is covered with blood. After considerable thought, Ed and the producers decided the blood was too much for the scene. Somehow, RSP managed to remove the blood. I have no idea how they did it, but they did it completely. I only wish I’d had more work for them to do.”