Over the past few months I’ve been working as 3d supervisor on the first season of Game of thrones for ScreenScene Vfx in dublin and pretty much all of it was rendered in Vray. Initially it was supposed to e a compositing based job with some gore enhancements on our side but it ended up being a much heavier 3d job. For a lot of the set extensions there were supposed to b large amounts of elements shot but with deadlines and various other factors nothing suitable was shot so the entire thing had to be doe in 3d. There’s a tonne of small shots with weapon extensions and blood hits since if you do it practically it’s difficult to get a second take, but also some larger environment extensions which used a lot of cg trees, displacement, some fume fx fog and smoke elements and a lot of digital doubles with a really simple maxscript crowd system. Vray proxies came in extremely handy for this since we couldn’t have dealt with the amount of detail necessary otherwise. Syntheyes was used for the tracking and nuke for all the comping. There were three 3d ops in total over the course of the 5 / 6 months we were working on the project with Vadim Draempaehl (http://www.spellcraft.de/) doing loads of gorgeous modelling and texturing work as well as doing all the source animation clips for our crowd setups, and Daniel Rath (http://crustedink.com/) doing a tonne of really high quality lighting, modelling and animation work on a load of shots. Both great people to work with and if you need vfx artists I wouldn’t hesitate to hire either of them.
It was good fun to work on with such well shot footage and also it meant working again with the team I started off with years ago. Thanks to Ed Bruce, Screen Scenes VFX supervisor for bringing me back in on it.
very very nice work.. nerdy question.. what res did you render at and what were your final aa / noise thres. settings like? getting those distant trees shimmer free is always a bit of a killer.
nice work. What were the most intense scenes from a vray standpoint? Will you be working on season two? from what I know about the second book there would be a ton of fx work.
WOW John! Simply wow. I’m BIG fan of all HBO series and watched all episodes of GOT also ! It’s fantastic that someone form this forum worked on those.
Again spectacular work and congrats on getting such an awesome gig.
Vance the big battle scenes were a nasty one in terms of the sheer amount of objects in it in terms of being able to make quick revisions. The scenes were quite heavy even though they made use of a tonne of proxies so they weren’t the most agile to work with. We had 12 gigs of memory in each of the render nodes too which wasn’t really enough for some things, and also we found we had a lot of problems with memory leaks which were likely cause by the command line renderers of 3dsmax and nuke. The scenes were just big, it wasn’t anything really particularly hard (tracking some shots was the hardest aspect) or complex. We just had to work out a few methods of being able to do lots of stuff efficiently so it could be thrown out and changed easily. We started off using hand placement of things which then changed to a texture driven particle flow baker for distribution - really we should have bought multi scatter or forest for that stuff.
I’ll check the aa of the tree shots too, I think about 12 was the highest it ended up going?
Love the show, probably my favorite show on TV right now, can’t wait for the second season, bought the books to keep me occupied til then.
Incredible work with the CG, when I first saw the series I wondered how much they spent making the sets! I’m blown away with the break downs. Looking forward to next season, keep up the fantastic work!
Just did a quick check on the tree shots and they were only 1,8 adaptive dmc area, adaptive amount 1.0 and Irmap / lc. It was onyx for the tree meshes cached out to proxies in most cases except when I had to do animated trees for some movement which is quite difficult - the wind parameters aren’t great for getting natural results easily in my opinion.
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