Testimonial

2012 interview with Mohsen Mousavi,  FX Technical Supervisor

1) I think it's safe to say that 2012 is the  most highly anticipated VFX movie this year. Can you tell us how you were involved in the production of 2012?

We were involved in the production of 2012 from a very early stage. First , we did the previz for a lot of the major sequences and then were awarded with the glacier shots. The 2012 previz was definitely a huge challenge, due the complexity of the shots and the level of accuracy that Roland Emmerich expected. The previz was not supposed to be a rough guideline for the production and/or other vendors, but was meant to supply very in-depth assets. If you compare a lot of the final shots in the movie, they use almost the same camera, timing and design of the destruction shots from the previz. In the LA sequence for example, when the limo drives to the airport, we see all the buildings being destroyed from the side. Creating a simple building with 2 or 3 key frames representing a destruction would not be sufficient, because the whole design and the timing of the sequence was based on mass destruction. So we had to produce a lot of good looking and semi-advanced destruction in a very limited time (previz budget).

1) Which shots in particular were you involved in?

At first, I designed a lot of setups and presets for my FX team and flowed the shots, technically, in the right direction. At the same time, I worked directly on all the Antonov destruction shots which involved difficult FX planning, development and finalizing.

2) What Cebas software did you use in the production of 2012 and why?

At Pixomondo, we previously used to do all of our rigid body simulations in particle flow, reactor or custom build scripts. With 2012, we knew that the scale of the production required a more robust and advance framework. After looking at a number of different solutions, I reviewed thinkingParticles (TP) and very quickly realized that the toolset had good potential to be customized for our FX department. Together with the production company, Uncharted Territory, we had the opportunity to take advantage of the alpha development of the new thinkingParticles toolset, which was particularly designed to meet the complexity of 2012 shot production.

3) How did you use our software to achieve the effects?

thinkingParticles was involved in almost every FX scenario on which we worked. Particularly, the new volumeBreaker with Shape Collision played a very important role in the success of some of the most complex shots, as well as BlackBoxes, which were extremely useful for creating complex assets that could be shared by the team. The new cache methodology made it very simple to build a shot on different levels and assemble a hierarchy of cached elements which could interact. The same applies to the SDK provided which opened a complete new door to all the thoughts we had for the pipeline.

4) What features in particular helped you achieve your goal and how?

I think volumeBreaker and its seamless integration with thinkingParticles methodology was the most exciting part of the whole game. volumeBreaker masters Vornoi noise tessellation which provides excellent advantages in a production environment. Within thinkingParticles, we were able to design a tessellation guideline with a group of particles, which means we had infinite control over the look and manipulation of the tessellation. The volumeBreaker toolset is designed with flexibility in mind. For example, breaking an object on collision, with velocity and angle of collision in mind, we could:

• Query collision information like, "position" , "normal" , and "velocity" of the collision from the new multi-threaded Shape Collision engine. Based on the information queried, we were able to create a certain particle cloud pattern which was used as a guideline for the volume breaker (Vornoi tessellation). At a certain point, I had a library of different equations for different patterns.

• The seed particle cloud was customized based on the type of collision and was sent to the volumeBreaker Node. volumeBreaker was able to tessellate the collided geometry on the fly.

• Using full access to the broken geometry we created all kinds of secondary particles which had a tight relation to the type of the collision, due to the rule based methodology of thinkingParticles.

The new cache workflow was extremely useful and quickly became one of the main technical columns of any shot.

We were able to design custom written thinkingParticle Nodes through the provided SDK which opened a whole new level for customizing our internal pipeline.

5) What was the most difficult aspect of this project and how did you solve it?

As you might know, Pixomondo is a global multi-branch facility with a shared pipeline and infrastructure. Sometimes a shot flows through practically all the different branches. Every branch is quite specialized in a certain field. Obviously, the main challenge is to maintain the complex structure among departments, which are sometimes oceans apart!

6) How did Cebas's software integrate into your production pipeline? Was this straightforward?

As mentioned earlier, our FX pipeline is almost completely based on 3ds Max. Cebas has mastered development for 3ds Max and know the platform pretty well. So integrating the toolset in an already Max based pipeline was pretty straight forward.

7) What was the most fun or rewarding part of this project for you?

Research & development and working with so many different tools that were not yet officially released. We had the opportunity to influence the toolset methodology; making them work together was a very interesting experience.

8) What projects can we expect from you in the future? (Assuming you're able to tell us, that is).

2012 screening not finished yet, we have already started several new international projects. As FX Technical Supervisor and head of technology, together with my FX team, we are working on "Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief," Zack Snyder's, "Sucker punch," "Hindenburg," the remake of "A Nightmare on Elm Street," and more projects, which due to restrictions I cannot mention.

In conclusion, I would like to thank Henrik Zaehringer, "Lead Shading TD," and Florian Schroeder, "Head of 2D", The FX Team in particular and the entire Pixomondo network for their invaluable work and support.

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