DIGITAL LONDON--Anonymous

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.

"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)