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July 27, 2004

"We used BodyPaint 3D to texture most of the CG elements in 'King Arthur'"

Dottie Starling - Cinesite's Digital Effects Supervisor for the epic movie 'King Arthur' - on how MAXON's BodyPaint 3D helped to make an old kingdom look simply magic.

MAXON - "What shots did you use BodyPaint 3D for in 'King Arthur'?"

Dottie - "We used it to texture most of the CG elements, including the hawk, some of the Saxon armies and the massive ice lake environment."

MAXON - "Why does Cinesite use BodyPaint 3D ahead of other 3D paint apps?"

Dottie - "Primarily because of its similarities to how Studio Paint works. A lot of our texture painters really liked the way Studio Paint had been set up, especially the camera-to-object relationship, and we were missing that in DeepPaint. So we wanted something that felt as nice as Studio Paint, but had decent 3D painting capabilities. BodyPaint 3D seemed to fit that initial bill nicely.

"The 3D paint tool we were using before we switched to BodyPaint 3D always seemed better suited to 2D painting. Over the years, it tried to simulate Photoshop so much that it changed into a 2D paint package where you could rotate 3D geometry around. In a sense it was turning away from the job it was originally intended to do. It had some other problems too: It was poor at doing cloning and projection painting, and it was difficult to set up and maintain a scale relative to the image you wanted to project or clone from.

"Switching to BodyPaint was a nice change. It thinks like a proper 3D package and that means loads of plus points like moving the object closer to a camera in a spatial sense rather than having to think about scaling. BodyPaint is also great at cloning and projection painting, and is very easy to use."

MAXON - "How is a 3D paint app like BodyPaint 3D useful for films like 'King Arthur'?"

Dottie - "We had a lot of amorphous shapes and objects that required texturing, and the use of 3D paint package becomes very important. It's essential for painting real 3D objects which we are going to see close up. 2D painting becomes impractical when working with 3D mesh. You can run into all sorts of problems, such as stretching around edges of objects. You need to be able to move around the object to paint it, and that's exactly what BodyPaint lets you do."

MAXON - "The CG mountains in 'King Arthur' look stunning. How did you create them and manage to make them look so natural in the film?"

Dottie - "Three processes were used: Firstly, straight matte paintings, which is pretty standard stuff nowadays. Secondly, 2.5D backgrounds, where we split the matte paintings up, created a 3D camera track and then, using proprietary software, we brought the broken-up matte paintings into Shake as a macro which the compositor could then work with. This gave us full parallax, because we were using an actual camera and putting the matte paintings into a real 3D space.

"The third way was making a full 3D environment based on the matte paintings. We had to take a very specific approach to this from the beginning of the show. We knew that we were making up the backgrounds for the whole sequence - about 250 shots, I think - and we needed a way to create the look of the environment and get a quick buyoff from Antoine Fuqua, the director.

"We decided to pick about five shots which gave us a pretty big view of the valley, and then have our matte painting team do extremely high-res paintings of these backgrounds. We put these into shots, got Antoine's approval, and from there projected the matte paintings based on the shot cameras.

"From there, we used BodyPaint to do all of the detailed 3D painting and displacement maps which were needed for the large environment shots, but we also knew that we could move in and do tighter shots and still have them match the rest of the sequence. Continuity was a major concern in this sequence. That is why we set the look of all of our different angles from the beginning rather than do an overall 3D texturing approach.

"The worst thing would have been to have a full 3D environment made up that worked for the whole lake, but might not have worked for key shots, thus the shot approach first to make up the whole lake."

MAXON - "What does Cinesite like about BodyPaint 3D?"

Dottie - "Lots of things. Firstly, there's the Photoshop compatibility. We use Photoshop all the time, so any package that works with it and has layer compatibility is always a huge plus.

"We love that BodyPaint 3D works like a proper 3D program. Like I mentioned, many major 3D painters aren't as 3D as you would like, so this is nice to have.

"Then there's the interface layout. You can customize everything about it and that meant we could tailor a layout ideal for our particular way of working. We also found it worked in a similar fashion to Maya, and that made it very easy for new artists to pick up.

"We always tend to work from reference images to paint for film, so clone brush and its controls are very important to us. BodyPaint's great in this area.

"BodyPaint's also very easy to use. When a big job's on, we often bring on a lot of new artists from varied backgrounds. Having key tools that are easy to learn makes everyone's life a lot easier.

"Then there are loads of little reasons: the ability to see wireframes, fast refresh rates, a nice toolset, great support…"

MAXON - "What new features would you like to see appear in the next version of BodyPaint 3D?"

Dottie - "Well, there's always additional things we'd like to see in any app. With BodyPaint, support for 16-bit textures would be great for us. In film, the more colours you have at your disposal, the better.

"Also, maybe some scripting tools. We don't use Maya rendering very much, or Maya shaders. All we need to do is make textures and export them.

"We'd also love to see a Linux version!"