Step by Step: Extreme Decks

Matte World Digital, Novato, Calif., is well-known for creating synthetic environments, amassing a long credit list that includes Cats & Dogs, The Last Samurai, and The Ring. It's a film portfolio that company founder and visual effects supervisor Craig Barron doesn't hesitate to show potential commercial clients, either. When the Dallas, Texas-based ad agency The Richards Group presented its storyboards for the Home Depot spot “Extreme Decks,” it required backgrounds ranging from rain forests to deserts to arctic ice. The point of the :30 spot was to illustrate how Home Depot's outdoor decks can survive extreme temperatures, and Barron's strategy was to show those diverse environments using virtual set techniques.

“Their initial concern was that if these sets looked unrealistic then it would hurt the credibility of the product,” says Barron. “It took a little time to convince the client that we could make the shots look real in CG, and it helped to show them a variety of 3D environments that we'd created for feature films. After that it was agreed that we could do whatever we wanted as long as their product in the scene was real.”

The spot begins with the camera pushing through tropical plants to reveal the deck of a secluded Hawaiian home. A couple lounges in their hammock, surrounded by a lush rain forest, complete with a waterfall. A key challenge, explains Barron, “was that we needed many layers in 3D to mimic a ‘real world’ camera move. Otherwise, the viewer would miss the spatial dimensionality you'd expect to see if you were really moving through a jungle environment.”

Matte World began by creating a 3D animatic using 3ds Max to determine the camera move and composition. “This became a template for the spot, and as we finished shots we dropped them in. It's a step that we do routinely in film, but not as often in commercials.” Because the animatic clearly revealed that nearly every shot required some visual effects, Barron was tapped to direct the spot as well as supervise the effects.

The animatic was used as a guide during the greenscreen shoot with the actors on an actual deck. “We shot on film and kept 16-bit color information all the way through the process,” Barron says. “We decided to scan the negative to Cineon 2K and then do color correction later on a Flame. When you go into a color-correcting session, it's nice to have the latitude to try some experiments and not have the shot go pasty if you want to try something different.”

While most of the environments surrounding the deck were designed to be virtual, Barron did push the camera through real plants for the initial reveal. “That got some reality into the scene. Then we added 10 plants around the deck that were done in 3ds Max. They're animated to move a little bit in the wind. We do add geometry to create a sense of z-depth movement through the environment, but we don't want to do more than the viewer will perceive because that would just slow the render down.”

Rendering efficiency was essential in a spot with multiple environments, and Matte World employed a radiance map renderer from the Chaos Group called VRay. “It was written by a Bulgarian guy named Vladimir Koylazov,” says Barron. “We call him ‘Vlad the Renderer.’ VRay is a gorgeous renderer that describes light in the environment. It's not a true radiosity renderer. It uses some shortcuts. You can bake the radiosity solutions to a texture environment, and then you can move the camera without rerendering every frame. We're always interested in anything that provides global illumination solutions, because in rendering environments, we want to describe what light is doing in the real world.”

Barron mined Matte World's extensive catalog of real world textures to create the 2D texture maps and backgrounds used in the shot. “We have a directory of elements kept as digital files, including a variety of skies. Photoshop was used extensively for working on the maps and any kind of 2D images that had to be manipulated.”

To make the layers of 2D jungle paintings come alive, Barron's team filmed a Northern Californian waterfall not far from the studio. “The waterfall adds an element of reality that wasn't computationally expensive to bring into the scene. We placed it on a card so that it moves correctly in the frame.” This approach saved them from having to render the water as 3D particles, though they did animate some layers of 3D mist particles to help blend their 2D elements together.

Photography of flames was also used to create believable flickering of the tiki torches that surround the deck. Barron avoided having actual flames flickering on set. “We didn't want them playing over the greenscreen,” he explains. “We photographed a lit torch in close-up and then tracked the flames into the shot with the RealViz MatchMover.”

While Matte World runs its 3ds Max software on Windows, for compositing they use Shake running on Macs. “Ideally, we'd love to have one operating system,” admits Barron, “but the reality is that there are certain economic strategies that software providers have, which means that we have to have multiple platforms.”

In the final analysis, he observes, “I've always felt it was important to keep things flexible enough that you can use new technologies and not get so locked into your pipeline that you can't take advantage of a good idea that's out there.” Barron notes that the art of creating virtual environments is, after all, “a cheat. We do whatever it takes to get the final effect.”