CompuServe Thread

Rico, The director of Stargate wanted to achieve a mechanical look to the helmet effect…standard morphing as it existed early last year could not create this effect. The special effects crew at Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company considered using 3D to create the effect, which in many ways was similar to the bat-mobile armor effect and the viper armor effect, both of which had appeared not too long before and were done in 3D. They decided that the motion envolved in the mask shots, including fist fights and wrestling and such would be too complex to model accurately. Instead, already being Elastic Reality customers, asked our company to come up with a means of creating the mechanical look of the effect. Elastic Reality for SGI, at the time, was version 1.3, which was the code base for Elastic Reality for Windows. It could not produce the mechanical effect desired because an important part of the mechanical look required pieces of the armor to telescope out from (or retract into) other pieces. This would produce the crossing-edge problem where two pieces butted up against each other and, because of the actor's motion, would sometimes overlap (cross edge). We created an entirely new warping mode called JIGSAW which treats all shapes or groups of shapes as entirely seperate warps, all computed in parallel, and merged into the final result, in one pass of the warping kernel. This technological advanced was the key to creating the look the director wanted. (continued)

(part 2 of the making of the stargate mask effects) The action was filmed twice. Once with the bad guy wearing the fully extended helmet, and once with the bad guy not wearing the helmet. The fight scenes were planned and choreographed so that the motion would be similar in both shots. An incredible testament to the forgiving "FIX IT IN POST!" capabilities of Elastic Reality is that the shots typically DID NOT LINE UP. That is, in addition to making the helmet pieces appear or disappear like a mechanical apparatus, ER was also picking up the bad guy from where he was in take one, and lining him up with where he needed to be to coincide with take two. The effects guys at Kleiser-Walczak were really super. They fed back their problems, and our programmers fed back fixes and they put in a lot of hours, assembling the many intricate helmet shots in the movie. They had to walk a very fine line, that is, their work had to be perfect because in several shots, the effect was to take place during close-ups of the actor's faces…this is the cinematic equivalent of a master magician performing slight-of-hand with his audience only inches away. The Kleiser-Walczak team, in my opinion (and in the opinion of reviewers like Siskel and Ebert) did a fabulous job on those effects. The material itself was scanned film frames shots in an animorphic (or some other greek sounding word) format…Elastic Reality dynamically adjusted for the pixel aspect on the fly. The JIGSAW warping mode was to go into Elastic Reality 2.0 for the SGI (and did). Before ER 2.0 for the SGI came out, however, we released ER 1.0 for Windows, which coming from the same code base has exactly the same JIGSAW capability which has gone on to be the basis of many of our TransJammer effects. Jason Lifestyles of the poor and anonymous