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-- For visual effects producers working on the Star Trek television series, space isn't the final frontier - it's creating computer-generated characters. Reaching that frontier hasn't been easy given the production schedule faced by the vfx team.
"We don't have a lot of time to spend on R&D of new techniques since our schedule is so tight," says Ron Moore, Paramount Studio's vfx supervisor for Enterprise, the latest series in the Star Trek brand. "If something doesn't work, we have to be able to correct it in a short amount of time."[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Moore has been working with the Star Trek television series for 17 years, and supervised a number of effects shots, including the first completely CG character in The Next Generation's "Datalore" episode.
"I've seen our effects characters evolve from a tumbleweed-looking creature to the fully CG 8472 and Xindi aliens in Enterprise," he says.
A crowd from two scans
For the recent "Extinction" episode of Enterprise, Moore needed to populate an alien city with hundreds of extras, which he didn't have time to model from scratch. He came up with a different solution - digitizing two actors dressed as the aliens, and using the 3D models for crowd replication.
Moore had heard about Eyetronics portable scanning services from Nick Tesi, the company's vice president of U.S. operations, and thought they might fit his needs. He visited Eyetronics' Los Angeles facility for a demo and liked what he saw.
"We've worked with other scanners that arrive on trucks and need rigging systems," says Moore. "Eyetronics' approach is much like taking regular digital pictures - much more convenient for our schedule."
Eyetronics scans with its hand-held ShapeCam system, a digital camera and specially designed flash devices mounted on a lightweight frame. ShapeCam allows Eyetronics technicians to move freely around persons or objects, capturing dimensional and texture information by simply taking pictures. The scan data is processed in the company's proprietary software and exported as 3D models with texture and color data.
Eyetronics technicians visited the Enterprise set in Los Angeles to capture full-body scans of the two extras in alien make-up, as well as regular cast members Jolene Blalock, who plays T'Pol in the series, and Linda Park, who plays Hoshi Sato. Moore wanted Blalock's scan for experimentation with effects and the level of detail Eyetronics' scans provided. The four characters' scans were used in a sequence in the "Extinction" episode where Captain Archer dreams of a destroyed alien civilization in its prime.
"The fact that Eyetronics was able to come to the set and do the scans without the added expense of getting the actors in wardrobe and make-up a second time made the whole process possible," says Fred Pienkos, Enterprise's supervisor with Eden FX, the series' vfx house.
Pienkos and his team received high-resolution polygonal meshes and UV-textured models of the aliens from Eyetronics. The CG characters were far away from the camera in the final composition of the scene, so animators at Eden FX populated the city with lower-resolution models that were match-moved to motion-capture data.
"A big plus with Eyetronics is the ability to provide the texture maps along with the 3D data," says Pienkos. "The scan data came in ready to use, so my team was able to work on other aspects of the fx sequence. We just had to edit the surface in our rendering software to get the right look and drop the models into our pipeline."
The Eyetronics models were supplied as Maya files, imported into Motion Builder 3D for match-moving, and rendered in Lightwave 3D.
Evolving CG characters
The new scanning and processing techniques open more options for adding CG characters throughout the Enterprise series.
"Eventually we want to get 3D scans of all of the principal characters because we know the high level of detail Eyetronics can provide, especially for facial close-up shots," says Moore. "We want to evolve with the technology and grow slowly. Star Trek has been on television for a while, and we've taken some risks, but they've been calculated risks the creators and fans have been happy with."
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