Nuke Hits The Blot On Watchmen At Intelligent Creatures Anyone who has seen Watchmen, director Zack Snyder’s 2009 big screen adaptation for Warner Bros. of the 1980’s eponymous comic book series, cannot fail to be utterly transfixed by the shape-shifting inkblot on the mask of vigilante Rorschach. These subtle but stunning effects, which express his changing emotions through the dramatic story, prompt genuine ‘How did they do that?’ reactions. The answers were provided by Nuke in the more than capable hands of the visual effects team at Intelligent Creatures in Toronto, Canada, which delivered over 320 shots for the film. With fully-integrated 2D and 3D compositing and animation pipelines, and a wealth of on-set experience, Intelligent Creatures is among the industry’s most progressive VFX creators. As a self-styled, artist-driven visual effects house, the company relentlessly pursues its mission to be a world-leading provider of visual effects, and to play a strong supporting role in high-end, creatively-driven feature films – of which the $180m grossing Watchmen is a prime example. The current owners and co-founders, Michael Hatton and Lon Molnar, met while working in the visual effects industry in Toronto, both of them holding senior positions, covering all aspects of visual effects production: visual effects supervision, digital compositing, 3D animation and production management. They flung open the company’s doors in 2003, and since then Intelligent Creatures has attracted such clients as Warner Bros., Miramax Films, MGM, New Line Cinemas, and Twentieth Century Fox.
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Nuke Hits The Blot On Watchmen At Intelligent Creatures
Anyone who has seen Watchmen, director Zack Snyder’s 2009 big screen adaptation for
Warner Bros. of the 1980’s eponymous comic book series, cannot fail to be utterly
transfixed by the shape-shifting inkblot on the mask of vigilante Rorschach.
These subtle but stunning effects, which express his changing emotions through the
dramatic story, prompt genuine ‘How did they do that?’ reactions. The answers were
provided by Nuke in the more than capable hands of the visual effects team at
Intelligent Creatures in Toronto, Canada, which delivered over 320 shots for the film.
With fully-integrated 2D and 3D compositing and animation pipelines, and a wealth of
on-set experience, Intelligent Creatures is among the industry’s most progressive VFX
creators. As a self-styled, artist-driven visual effects house, the company relentlessly
pursues its mission to be a world-leading provider of visual effects, and to play a strong
supporting role in high-end, creatively-driven feature films – of which the $180m
grossing Watchmen is a prime example.
The current owners and co-founders, Michael Hatton and Lon Molnar, met while working
in the visual effects industry in Toronto, both of them holding senior positions, covering
all aspects of visual effects production: visual effects supervision, digital compositing,
3D animation and production management. They flung open the company’s doors in
2003, and since then Intelligent Creatures has attracted such clients as Warner Bros.,
Miramax Films, MGM, New Line Cinemas, and Twentieth Century Fox.
The company’s dedication to collaborating with some of cinema’s finest directors to help
them tell compelling stories has resulted in a list of VFX credits that includes Doug
Litman’s Mr & Mrs. Smith, Marc Forster’s Stranger Than Fiction, Alejandro González
Iñárritu’s Babel, Joel Schumacher’s Number 23, and Patrick Tatopoulos ‘ Underworld III:
Rise of The Lycans.
“When it comes to seamless live-action visual effects and creative design, we aim to
continually raise the bar, and Nuke is pivotal in helping us in our efforts,” says
Intelligent Creatures’ CTO and VFX supervisor Michael Hatton. The company switched to
Nuke in 2008.
“Nuke was a direct drop-in replacement for what we were using before. It is used by
lighters and compositors for virtually every compositing-related task here. During all of
the projects we have thrown at Nuke, it has proven extremely stable across multiple
platforms – Linux being most important to us, followed by Mac. It has integrated easily
into our pipeline and offers really good customising ability using scripting languages
we're already familiar with.”
Almost all artists at Intelligent Creatures use Nuke on Linux workstations running 64-bit
openSUSE 11. Currently, Nuke runs on two workstation models – IBM Intellistation Z
Pros with Dual Xeon 5160 CPUs, 6Gb of RAM and NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500 cards, and
on HP xw8500s, with Core 2 Quad CPUs, 4Gb RAM and NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700s. It
also runs on several 8-core Mac Pro workstations for matte painters who might
occasionally need to pull things up in Nuke.
“We use Gigabit ethernet with jumbo frames everywhere between workstations and
production storage,” explains Jeff Klug, the company’s senior systems administrator.
“All production data is hosted on a cluster of Isilon nodes serving NFS to the
workstations. Clustered storage allows us to distribute the I/O in a way that has
significantly increased our maximum overall data throughput capability, with ease of
scalability.”
“Obviously, in post production we always want everything to be faster,” adds Klug. “That
being said, we've been very happy with Nuke's performance as compared to other
software. Artists who are more familiar with other software are often surprised by how
quickly their renders complete.”
So when Intelligent Creatures was given the responsibility of creating the dynamic and
continuously changing inkblots on that mask that conceals the face of Watchmen’s sci-
fi, neo-noir superhero Rorschach, the company was well-tooled.