Cinema 4D Helps Painting Practice Bring Man-Eating Plants Alive in The Day of the Triffids "Cinema 4D provided a solid backbone throughout the entire pre-production and post-production process".

Leading concept / pre-viz studio Painting Practice used Maxon's Cinema 4D software to create incredible effects and locations for the BBC's two-part television drama, The Day of the Triffids, starring Dougray Scott (Mission: Impossible II), Joely Richardson (Nip/Tuck), Brian Cox (X2), Vanessa Redgrave (Deep Impact), Eddie Izzard (The Riches) and Jason Priestly (Beverly Hills 90210).

Painting Practice took the lead role in handling the entire vision of the show, using Cinema 4D as its main pipeline, through concept design, production design, pre-viz and finally, digital matte painting.

Painting Practice became involved with The Day of the Triffids from its very early stages. Initially, the producers of the show approached one of the studio's co-founders, Production Designer Joel Collins. The task was to begin considering the actual design and look of the Triffid. During two months of development, the in-house team at Painting Practice helped establish the Triffid's complete biology, life cycle and movement.

Pre-visualization for The Day of the Triffids was handled entirely by Painting Practice, again using Cinema 4D as its main tool.

"Cinema 4D is our main pipeline. We all love it and the speed with which we can put a scene together and get it rendered makes it a no-brainer," said Senior Pre-Viz Artist Justin Atkinson.

Cinema 4D's fast turnaround often meant that the team were even able to embellish some of the shots with motion blur - usually considered a no-go when it comes to pre-viz.

In the early stages, before handling the script, the team were asked to consider the physical behavior of the Triffid - a tricky job. How would the plant move and kill? Added to this, the root system itself was incredibly complicated. The resulting triffid rig was relatively detailed, providing the necessary control of the roots and main leaves plus the stem and head.

"After some testing we came up with a pretty cool result, certainly good enough to convince the producers of where this plant was heading and how it would get there," said Joel.

However, it soon became apparent that this detailed Triffid rig was going to be too heavy for the final pre-viz once the scenes were filled with large numbers of Triffids. So the answer was to build a series of low-poly Triffid rigs that allowed certain movement suitable for their placement in the shot. In addition, a set of hero roots were created in order to handle detailed interaction with the human characters and the physical world around them. Using constraints the animators were also able to build longer, more complex root rigs for the more involved shots.

One other vital time saver, which Cinema 4D solved, was shot numbering and 'burn-ins.' By combining the render HUD attributes with their own custom 'Doodle' image, each shot gathered its own burn-in info at render time, giving each clip all the information needed by the VFX team and the editor. To help the process, Head of 3D at Painting Practice, Krzysztof Niemiec, built a complete set of custom, real-world camera rigs that automatically imported the lens, scene, shot version, and also the artist's name into the HUD.

Unique to this process was the fact that Painting Practice had a key involvement in all parts of the production pipeline and was on board even before the production was fully green lit. Producer Stephen Smallwood and his team were eager to have the monster nailed before production got underway at Shepperton Studios. Having designed the Triffid, Painting Practice was very aware of its complications and limitations.

VFX Art Director Dan May worked very closely with the production's VFX Supervisor, Tom Turnbull, to make sure that any in-camera Triffid action would stand up and feel real. "We were very aware of budgetary limitations but one thing we were very keen to maintain was a filmic quality to the production," said Dan. "We put together a small crew of Triffid makers and assembled the 'rooty bits.'"

"Because we had a small budget we had to recycle everything! We made farm Triffids, lots of leaves, hero Triffid roots and a Triffid head for the dissection scene," added Dan. "We also had an arsenal of slime, twigs, blood and earth to dress sets which had been attacked by Triffids. We had several large posts of varying heights to give the actors something to reference during key Triffid sequences."

Special 'rooty bits' were used to grab and interact with the actors, although Painting Practice soon found it best to leave the actors clean of any prosthetics and instead use fishing line and wire to give them something to fight against or to constrict their clothing. This gave the VFX team something to interact with the digital roots. Having done all the pre-vis, Painting Practice was able to break down all the key Triffid shots and work out which bits of Triffid kit would work best for each shot.

Once shooting had begun, the next role for the creative team was to begin designing the VFX shots for the entire film. Switching roles from pre-viz artist to matte painter, Justin set about designing the matte shots together with the in-house matte painting team.

"Anything with a matte painting in it needed to be designed - quickly!" said Justin. "Most of the time we would have half a day, or a full day if we were lucky, and there were lots of shots to get through. Still, it was a lot of fun."

The studio was awarded six of the final shots for the film, most of which involved the 'Triffid Research Facility,' seen in the opening sequence and again after the Triffids had trashed the place. The facility had to be created entirely in 3D; again, Cinema 4D was called in to do the job, both for texturing and lighting as well as for the final projection. Once the shots had been tracked, the model was then placed into the ‘real world' space and rendered out so that the painting could be worked up in Photoshop.

Finally, in order to make the shot happen, the tree line needed to be extracted from the plate and re-projected back onto cards, leaving just the bridge and the road as live elements. Each part of the painting was rendered out from Cinema 4D as a separate pass for compositing in Shake using the object buffer for all the matte passes.

Another set of paintings involved the facility entrance, again covering the passage of time from the opening sequence to the destruction of the facility. A detailed model of the ‘Orchard' building was required because reference photography from the actual location wouldn't work. For these shots, the paintings were projected onto simple cards within Nuke, where additional lens distortion and focus pull were added.

Summing up Cinema 4D's contribution to the project, Dan said, "Cinema 4D provided a solid backbone throughout the entire pre-production and post production process."

All images courtesy Painting Practice.

Painting Practice is a leading concept / pre-viz studio. Using the conventional talents of storyboarding through to complex 3D previs and motion capture technique, Painting Practice has the team and experience to assist in any project in both film and advertising. Painting Practice's skills have also been used within product design, architectural conceptualization and many other commercial design disciplines.

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www.paintingpractice.com