Roland Emmerich's 2012

It was the unique nature of the project that motivated Ivo Horvat to take on the job of matte painting supervisor for Roland Emmerich's recently released sci-fi disaster movie, 2012. When he signed on to the project, Horvat, a long-time matte painter, became part of a team of more than 100 artists working for Los Angeles-based film production company Uncharted Territory, which coordinated the making of visual effects for the film. Rather than running a traditional brick-and-mortar operation while working on the film, Uncharted Territory created a new visual effects model by creating a studio from scratch right in the production office on the Sony Pictures lot.

In addition to coordinating the work of in-house matte painters and work by artists at several of the 14 outside companies that contributed to the film (including Sony Pictures Imageworks, Crazy Horse Effects, Digital Domain and Double Negative), Uncharted used Maxon's Cinema 4D to create the bulk of the matte paintings in the movie's Las Vegas scenes.

With the destruction of the entire world being depicted in the film, Uncharted co-founders Volker Engel and Marc Weigert, who acted as co-producers and special effects supervisors, decided to hire in-house artists to take on the Los Angeles and Las Vegas sequences. All told, Uncharted contributed 422 shots to the film's total of 1,315, including 100 in the Vegas sequence, 120 in the LA sequence and the rest in a snowy, mountain scene they did along with some green screen work and compositing tweaks. Check out Uncharted Territory's Web site.

The difficulty with Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Horvat says, was that the cities were almost entirely comprised of CG and matte paintings. Dylan Cole, a matte painter on the Uncharted team, made several contributions to the Las Vegas sequence, including the dramatic establishing shot of the city after it has been reduced to smoking rubble. "That shot was particularly challenging because I had to define the look of this destroyed city but still have it be recognizable as Las Vegas," says Cole.

For Alex Nice, who normally uses 3D Studio Max and Maya, becoming one of Uncharted's matte painters for the film meant learning how to use Cinema 4D as he worked. He was pleasantly surprised. "Cinema 4D quickly won me over with its ease and speed," says Nice, who was often dealing with massive Photoshop files composed of hundreds of layers. "I was surprised by the seamless integration between Cinema 4D and Photoshop. With just a few drags and clicks I had a Photoshop layer applied to its corresponding piece of geometry and I was on the to next one."

While the action pic boasts all the scenes of destruction you'd expect from Roland Emmerich, there is also a lot of time spent on the survivors and their struggles in the aftermath of the cataclysm unleashed on the earth. Steve Messing, a matte painter at Crazy Horse Effects in Venice, California, created a memorable scene of a sprawling refugee camp in Tibet where the movie's stars wind up following a plane crash in the Himalayan mountains nearby.

Having been given footage of a set, shot in Kamloops, British Columbia, that included about three dilapidated huts on a short stretch of dirt road, Messing used Cinema 4D to build an entire camp that looks as if it goes on forever. "We chose Cinema 4D because, with so much parallax, we knew we couldn't do it in 2D," Messing recalls, pointing out that the clothes fluttering on the camp's clotheslines were made using Cinema 4D's Soft Body Dynamics. "With other programs, I would have had to have a specialist come in to do that, but Cinema 4D's tools are so efficient, I did it myself," he says.

Michele Moen, another one of Uncharted's in-house matte painters, contributed several matte paintings to the project. However, one shot, showing the devastated city on fire, was particularly difficult. "The painting combined about eight different scenes and at one point it had grown into a gigantic, hard-to-handle, 5-gigabyte Photoshop file with 200 layers," she recalls. Knowing each scene needed to be well composed within its own frame and remain composed as the camera moved, Moen projected layers of smoke, shadows, sunrays and atmosphere onto cards in Cinema 4D.

Asked to talk more about the challenges artists faced when working on the film, Horvat pointed out the ever-present need to create scenes that could bridge the gap seamlessly between all of the different filmmaking techniques and technologies that were being used. In the Vegas sequence, for example, scenes included full and partial CG, indoor and outdoor shots (not always from the same locations), blue screen, combinations of CG and matte paintings—and much more. "The entire sequence features brutally accurate continuity with each shot and angle needing to be well thought out to fit the edit, drama and physical layout," he explains. "Cinema 4D played an important role in how I achieved all of this because I used it in so many different ways from planning and pre-visualization to matte painting, animation, modeling, camera projection and rendering."