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Located in a neo-neighborhood of audacious architecture in Culver City, Zoic Studios and its neighbors could well provide futuristic inspiration for CG artists. Inside, the studio's space is dissected and defined by bold lumber beams. If you stripped out all of the computer workstations and added a cargo deck, it's a place in which you could imagine Serenity's Captain "Mal" Reynolds and his motley mates would feel mighty comfortable. Indeed, Zoic Studios won the 2003 Emmy for Outstanding Special Visual Effects for Firefly, Joss Whedon's cult hit television series that spawned the big screen Serenity. But Zoic's accomplishments extend beyond the twentysomething-century space shows. Their list of credits includes Deuce Bigalow 2, Van Helsing, Spiderman 2 and C.S.I. Miami. And two memorable award-winning ads highlight Zoic's commercials resume; the 2004 Mini Cooper "Men of Metal" TV/web ad (famous for the robot comprised of disassembled auto parts of the Mini car); and the 2005 Hewlett-Packard campaign for digital photography products (with its moving, morphing, framed and frozen video images). Chris Zapara, CG Supervisor at Zoic, recently spoke about his longstanding affinity for LightWave. With two Emmy nominations for his LightWave work, (including the latest for the episode, "Resurrection Ship, Part 2" from Season 2's Battlestar Galactica), Zapara has reason to cheer about his preferred CG tool. He explained, "At Zoic, our big identity is intrinsically tied in with LightWave - at least the way I see it. Yes, we use several tools, but the shows that Zoic has been involved with - Firefly, Serenity, and Battlestar Galactica - are basically LightWave shows." Said Zapara, "LightWave has a proven track record - on television especially. All the big shows use LightWave. They do it because it's stable, it's very fast, and it's very reliable. You can run LightWave with very low R&D overhead. A program like Maya is admittedly much more open-ended and extensible than LightWave, but to access that, you need dedicated TDs, (technical directors), and dedicated coders or you run the risk of sucking your artists dry in production time by writing scripts." Zapara speaks from experience. His career in many ways parallels LightWave's recent TV and movie successes. "I was here at Zoic earlier as a freelance supervisor to work on the finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That show was heavily done in Maya, whenever they did the vampire dustings. But in Season 7, they had a shot with all these vampires where they pulled out of the Hell Mouth - the big cave. Apparently it was somewhat problematic just from the huge data sets and they wanted to do much more than that in the finale. Joss Whedon said, 'I want these massive armies of ubervampires climbing the walls and getting dusted all at once in a giant apocalyptic moment. And I want it in eight weeks.'" "I had done some crowd work in Children of Dune, (at Area 51 Studios), although my focus on that show was sandworms. So for Buffy, I did a lot of motion capture and tied it in with some big particle systems. We loaded up huge armies of vampires, maybe a thousand at a time. It was slow but we pulled it off. We actually used the cloth dynamics system to drive the vampires." The final tally was about 7000 vamps in a shot at one time. That episode won a VES (Visual Effects Society) award and was nominated for an Emmy. After the Buffy stint, Zapara went to Eden FX to work as a supervisor on Enterprise and later on Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy. Then Zoic called and offered him a sequence lead on Serenity. "They showed me these really fantastic and challenging apocalyptic space battles. I looked at it and said, 'That's going to be really hard but also lots of fun.' There were a lot of revisions on the show, like any film, but we were able to put a very large spaceship on the screen and ended up doing some pretty cool shots." Joss Whedon said, "I want these massive armies of ubervampires climbing the walls Post Serenity, Zapara started as a supervisor for the second season of the Sci-Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica. "The first episode of Season 2 required this big space battle and the Visual Effects Supervisor Gary Hutzel said, 'I would like to create a flak cloud around the ship, protecting it from missiles.' Using the volumetric and particle systems in LightWave, I created a setup where you took a box and wherever you moved it, bunches of fire and explosions would follow. When you look at the final shot, it's just mayhem." Zapara revealed more fireworks for the upcoming Season 3. "Episode 3 is going to be another one of those, 'Oh man, this is so hard, but it's going to be so much fun.' There are some really spectacular effects." Historically, LightWave was designed and sold as a complete do-it-all-by-yourself CG tool kit. Said Zapara, "A lot of LightWave artists hearken back to the days of 'script to screen,' where they have the script in one hand, they read the lines, and it's in their brain all the way to the end. It's a one pass render and it goes to tape." While LightWave v9 offers yet more of the specialized tools required for creating film effects, its CG Renaissance man reputation still stands. "One of LightWave's big strengths is that it is very accessible on many fronts." "That helps people become generalists, more so than with Maya." Continued Zapara, "With LightWave you can literally have one guy in one seat getting it all done. Now, in reality, you tend to specialize. You have guys who are better modelers or better texturers. So you push them off to the side." Another advantage of LightWave is that the cameras and the lights work like they do on a real world set, which facilitates communication with clients that don't have a lot of 3D programming experience. "If a client comes in and stands behind you," Zapara explained, "they can see that that's a soft light or that's a spot light and that you can turn it or close the barn doors just like the real thing. And the LightWave camera behaves like a camera." "On the surface, these are fairly simplistic reasons why I like LightWave," said Zapara, "but they add up to a lot of production time saved. You can rapidly put textures on, get realistic lighting, throw in particles and make a very presentable animatic, very, very fast. And it has a very good built-in renderer." That is not to say that there's a total NewTek monopoly at Zoic. "The studio uses quite a few programs. LightWave and Maya are the predominant 3D programs. Combustion, After Effects and Shake are the 2D programs. I also use Particle Illusion. We track with Boujou. We have Avids and Flames. We have some Z Brush seats to do organic modeling. It's really using the best tools for the job." But at the end of the day, "It turns out that because we do a lot of fast turnaround and hard body stuff, LightWave still tends to be the best solution for a lot of the stuff we do." "To be truthful, there was a lot of Maya in that movie," admitted Zapara, returning to Serenity. "It wasn't all LightWave, although almost all of the spacecraft and everything in space was LightWave." This brought up the perennial debate of LightWave versus Maya in the film world. "I think," said Zapara, "the reason why LightWave doesn't get work in film is two-fold. First, because it is so popular in television, people think therefore it's not good enough for movies." "Also, if a film has a large budget and a large production schedule, then, Maya may get you more because you can afford the programming staff to write your custom codes. You can have the guy who just sits there all day figuring out a way to make the toenails work on the dinosaur. Television doesn't have that." "That's becoming less and less the case as film production schedules become faster and faster. The line between television and movies is really blurring. Serenity was a good example of that. ILM had a bid for Serenity and it was pretty much the entire budget of the film. Obviously that's not going to happen. Our budget was much, much, much, much lower. It allowed the film to be made."
M.R. Dinkins & Dick De Jong have covered the computer arts for over ten years. They reside in Austin, Texas. |
