The Chronicles of Narnia A large part of the movies’ success was due to their fantastic creatures and environments. Learn more about how ZBrush was used to create the films.

The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of fantasy films from Walden Media, based on the series of books sharing the same name and written by C. S. Lewis. Seven movies are planned in all and the series already stands as the 15th highest-grossing film series of all time.

A large part of that success has been due to the filmmakers' ability to bring fantastic creatures and environments to life. The films are brimming with special effects, so it's no wonder that MPC - one of the world's top visual effects houses - was called on to work on the most recent installment in the franchise: "Voyage of the Dawn Treader". With the movie being newly released on DVD, we wanted to talk with MPC about their work. Elliot Newman, the company's Head of Assets obliged us with a great interview covering what his company did for the film and the ways in which ZBrush was used.

Next time you watch the film you'll know just where to look to see ZBrush in action!

MPC is one of the world's leading Visual Effects houses. We have facilities in London, Vancouver, Los Angeles, New York and Bangalore. I come from a traditionally trained art and photography background and I have worked at MPC since 2004. Some of the projects I have worked on include "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", "Harry Potter", "Clash of the Titans" and "Kingdom of Heaven". In my current role as Head of Assets, I supervise the modeling and texturing teams.

In my team it ranges from about 20-35 artists, depending on how busy we are. I also work closely with the Vancouver studio which is currently at around 15 artists. Most of the modelers and texture artists use ZBrush. Because of its crossover between modeling and texturing we find that it's becoming increasingly important to get all the artists working with it in some form or another.

The biggest chunk of ZBrush work for us was establishing the design of the characters as 3D maquette sculptures. We also used ZBrush to detail up displacement maps for the Dawntreader and also for the Serpent, Dragon and some rocks seen when Eustace the Dragon is slammed against them in the serpent battle sequence. I think most of our builds went through some form of ZBrush pass, though.

With the dragon we already had a practical maquette built, which was delivered to us as a 3D scan. We used this to continue refining the shape of the creature, developing the form and aesthetics. We actually rebuilt the 3D scan as a lower resolution model which was then shrink-wrapped to the scan allowing us to rebuild the subdivision history inside ZBrush.

I think some directors still want to have a connection with practical models, but the advantage we had was being able to use ZBrush to make changes that would have taken much longer to do on a practical maquette. For example, we decided to work on the proportions of the head and presented various options for our clients. We spent time working on making this big golden dragon look as much like Eustace as possible, whilst maintaining the integrity of the original design. Once we felt happy with the 3D maquette sculpture, we started building up the topology as a deformable model which would then pass through the later stages of the pipeline including rigging and texturing. While we did this modeling work we had concept texturing work on top of renders of this ZBrush maquette so we could define the surface quality and color before we started the hardcore texture work.

Once the model was built and UV'd, we took it back into ZBrush to restore some of the broader sculptural details we had in the maquette. We still waited on the colour texture to define the layout of scales and finer wrinkles.

It gave us the ability to work in the fast interactive way we needed. As a sculpting tool it really has close links with the world of model making and practical sculpting. Traditionally, the world of CG is often a slow process of working out of context and then bringing elements back together again at the end. ZBrush gives you this in a more interactive way and with an incredible amount of detail that is editable in real-time. This means the creatures could be designed very interactively, often even to the point where directions can be given to an artist as he/she works. For getting design iterations out there this speed is essential.

On the other side we use ZBrush for detailing displacement maps which again historically had been painted out of context and then software rendered to see the result - quite a counterintuitive way to work. ZBrush means we can visualize what the displacement looks like. Even though we painted up in layers and used a complex shader network to connect all the layers in the renderer, we were still able to see what we painted before all of that.

Well that depends. I think the design sculpts came in around 7-10 million ploys but the final mesh when used to texture and displace was broken up into patches with many SubTools - each around 4-6 million polys, I think. Sometimes if we generated a displacement map outside of ZBrush we would bring in just one section of the model and divide it up to quite a high level so we could quickly preview that map before sending it out to the renderer.

I think the variety of brushes always give us the control to sculpt in certain ways. SubTools are handy to get you extra detail when and where you need it and the viewport shading is really exceptional.

It was hard to get the scales to flow in a way that made sense when the Dragon moved. We didn't want it just to be a random thing so a lot of effort was put into making the flow look anatomically correct. We did this by essentially just drawing guide lines on the model in a quick way, then tweaking till we had a final scale layout. This layout was then used as a reference for the actual scales which we did with a mixture of hand and photographic work. We wanted there to be some level of editability later so that if a change came in on something we could trickle it out through all the texture layers without having to repaint much. This is partly why we decided to work on layers in ZBrush and make the final composite of all the layers in our shading network as opposed to bringing all the texture elements into ZBrush at the same time.

For the Dragon we only extracted a small number of maps from ZBrush. We actually used is to preview the look of the scales in a fast way, with most of our scale maps then getting done in our 2D and 3D paint programs. I think we generated the maps from ZBrush with pretty standard export settings; nothing too fancy.

One thing that was quite difficult was making sure that the renderer did not filter the displacement too much, so that when the Dragon was far away from the camera you could still see the scales. We managed this partly by taking the displacement maps and using them as other controllers (kind of similar to how ZBrush builds its cavity shading algorithm).

Well there are organic parts of that ship that needed ZBrush sculpts to get the detail in the model. Other than that we used ZBrush to visualize what our displacement maps looked like before sending them to PRman. Being able to see textures in the viewport as displacement is already much faster than software rendering, even if the texture map did not get painted in ZBrush to begin with. For example, the hull and deck were all made from wood which needed some surface detail. You wouldn't want to paint all that with ZBrush as you would be doing it forever, so through some clever filtering and layering we process the textures into bump and displacement to get that wood look - again occasionally bringing the results into ZBrush to check how things work before sending it out to the renderer.

I think it was around 15 but since my department works on more than one show it means we are able to delegate resources for when and where they are needed. We always have dedicated leads that stay with the project throughout, though.

One of the biggest draws for me is when they have a good grounding in traditional art skills. I think the way software like ZBrush has changed things is that it has made it easier for traditional artists to use CG. Historically the training has been centered around how to use a piece of software. Now it's more about how you train as an artist - the software is the easier part (mostly!).

We usually recruit for people with specific skills. Each department at MPC works that way, although there is more and more emphasis on having secondary skills these days. For example I often recruit artists that can both model and texture as the two go hand in hand. Sometimes I speak to people that are even more specialized. Many people want to just be character modelers which is a problem for us as we cannot always offer that kind of work.

It is becoming very important for modelers and texture artists to show attention to detail which is often done in ZBrush. Without ZBrush it is harder to get a sense that an artist is able to hit that level. I think some of the work showing over at the ZBrushCentral forums really demonstrates the talent that is out there.

I think over the last few years MPC has made big steps forwards with its approach to building a solid foundation through the departments. This means artists have experience working with each other and there is a big team effort felt on the floor; more so than when you work at studios on shorter projects as part of a show-based team. I guess that, coupled with the quality of work MPC artists are doing, is what makes it such a great company to work for.

We use ZBrush for pretty much all the projects we work on. Most recently released was "X-Men: First Class" where we did the scene of Hank McCoy transforming into The Beast. We have some great work in progress this year which will further push the software. It's proving to be a pretty exciting year for us, although we can't really say anything just yet!

More of the same for MPC, really. 2011 is going to be a pretty big year for the teams in London and Vancouver. "Wrath of the Titans" will have some pretty crazy creatures and will be the first show to continue on the same lines as the others.

Pixologic would like to extend our gratitude to Elliot Newman for answering all our questions and sharing a glimpse into how his teams work in this highly competitive industry. We also thank the Moving Picture Company, Walden Media and 20th Century Fox for their cooperation in making this interview possible!