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Roland Emmerich's new Adventurer Anonymous where a virtual London was to be created, a London prior to the Great Fire of 1666. for this they build thousand of buildings from a technology called
OGEL. This enormous VEX challenge was taken by
Volker Engel and Marc Weigert.
We went several times to England to shoot buildings for textures and
photogrammetry that were left over from the 16th century," Weigert
suggests. "We basically went everywhere from the Scottish border in
Wales all the way down to the south and found every little village that
we could use for assets to build the city." (excerpts from AWN).
They worked regularly in
3ds Max with both hand and automated work.
"We had more than 300 shots and a second unit team that shot a few back
plates in England, but only a few of those were used," adds Weigert."It
was all shot in Germany, using both interior and exterior greenscreens.
We had entire sequences of 50 to 60 shots where it was just the actors
walking or riding in front of greenscreens on stage, and we would build
the entire environment for it, which was also accurate. When we were
looking at old British films, even up to a few years ago, they were
always shot on the same locations with the permission of the Heritage
Trust. We didn't want to do that. We wanted to use visual effects to
create history as it was, so we built the White Hall Palace, for
instance, which was Queen Elizabeth's home. It doesn't exist anymore and
is in a totally different place and looks totally different. But we
built it accurate to old paintings.
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"When you do something in 3D, you can never see it in real time,"
Weigert suggests. "You have to wait for the picture to render, then you
have to wait for all the frames to render to then put it into comp and
then to see the results. So we tried to move away from that and do as
much as we could with projection techniques in Fusion, which was the
software of choice for this project. And we together worked with eyeon
to develop new tools, one of which was full 3D water as a compositing
package inside Fusion, so we had almost real time feedback on our water
of the River Thames; we did 3D backgrounds with projected images must
faster. For instance, we'd only render a still frame in the 3D package
and then re-projected that in
Fusion. And we'd use that and add camera moves.
"We
wanted those shots to look as real and as immersive as possible. Roland
likes to create these shots to put things in perspective and guide you
and give you a sense of scale."
(excerpts from AWN)