Cinesite adopted new workflows to bring more flexibility to its creature pipeline for the latest incarnation of ‘The Witcher’. A new excerpt from issue #13 of befores & afters magazine.
In a particularly close-up scene in season 3 of Netflix’s The Witcher, Geralt (Henry Cavil) and Ciri (Freya Allan) take on the gruesome Aeschna on a chain ferry.
The creature has jumped from the water, resulting in a brutal confrontation on the deck of the vessel, complete with plenty of water, slime and blood interaction.
The sequence was filmed at Longcross Studios on a partial set, with Cinesite then responsible for bringing the creature to life. Having done many complex creatures before–including already on The Witcher series–Cinesite looked to revisit some of its approaches to this kind of work, namely, altering its workflow to be more flexible for the very real possibility of changes throughout the VFX process.
“Everything on a creature show is always going to be in flux,” observes Cinesite CG supervisor Samir Ansari, who worked with Cinesite visual effects supervisor Richard Reed on the show (the production VFX supervisor was Tim Crosbie). “The creature design process is always back and forth. You have to stay mechanically flexible with your forms and your design choices, and that was one thing that we spent a lot of time on at Cinesite, especially on this show.”
Ansari says the studio “put in place workflows and practices that essentially will give us enough commitment to be able to put things into shots, but still be able to jump back and make some quite broad changes even late into the game. We’ve definitely learned that over the years you’ve got to have quite a flexible pipeline that will allow that.”
Breaking down creature tasks
For Cinesite, working on a creature like the Aeschna now follows a modular approach, where the studio makes very deliberate decisions about scheduling build stages and breaking down tasks. This also involves making specific decisions about ‘commit’ stages.
“We asked ourselves,” relates Ansari, “at what point do we commit to this and what does commitment look like? What does commitment look like internally for us? What does commitment look like to the client? We want to make sure that the client can see all of their ideas put into a shot, but we also know that when a particular version has gone through the pipe, there might be three or four versions in the pipeline that are not quite in shots yet. So how do we ring-fence those to keep them in a holding pattern so that we can still see what it’s going to look like?”
The way this was handled was via Cinesite’s proprietary asset pipeline and packaging system.
“We have quite a robust bundling system that gives us really good visibility on where all of our versions are and what’s being used at any given time in any shot,” advises Ansari. “It takes into consideration variations, different resolutions and all those things.”
“For example, one thing that happened on this particular show–it’s not uncommon in any way–but you may have a broken UV map somewhere on a tooth, but that’s going to be unlocking 50 shots. It’s going to be unlocking the director approval or showrunner approval for motion reference on the entire sequence. I think directors and showrunners and the client in general will be able to see past that stuff if you can just present it in a certain way. So if that means to us just changing a broken tooth to something that’s a flat shader, then we will take that route just to be able to get extra visibility out there, and come back to the tooth later.”
“Ultimately what it meant,” continues Ansari, “is that when we picked up the Aeschna, we could establish milestones. We’d know how much render power we needed or had at certain points and then translate all that into something that’s schedule-appropriate and can respond to changes and variables.”
Gearing up for changes
But what other kinds of changes are we talking about here? Ansari identifies several variables, ranging from design changes to chronological battle damage, to the length of show. Others come about simply from the result of normal production steps.
“Something that’s not always entirely apparent is that these creatures are normally designed well before anyone’s taken a camera to the set. There might be early design work, and previs, and foam board cut-outs done–which was part of our Basilisks work on season 2. But even then it can be difficult because you only get rigid heads and no neck movement. So, as soon as you get actors interacting with these maquettes, things are going to change. There might also be early color choices or LUTs and camera profile choices that are made that may need to change.”
Ansari notes that all these things are typical of any production, but that it is then up to the VFX studio to have a pipeline in place that allows for flexibility. For example, with the Aeschna, once Cinesite saw the plates with the actors–impressive as they were–it was quickly realized that the creature as designed was going to be quite large in the sets that had already been filmed.
“We looked at all the footage and then adjusted our creature to suit. We had to look at the proportions of the tail, because it was going to be a lot harder to get it to do some of the action that we needed it to do based on the previs that we received. So we made a couple of structure changes there, including reducing the head size. Another thing was the grade. The Aeschna is a very dark creature, so we had to make some adjustments to add some more variation to the belly. We had to lighten it up a little bit more just so it didn’t become a dark smudge that didn’t fit on the boat.”
Another realization came in the form of the camera performance. The Aeschna arrival moment had largely been shot with a relatively stationary camera. “We instead identified that this was a huge moment,” states Ansari. “This is the moment for the Aeschna. So we checked with the client and then basically unlocked the camera completely to have full control of its performance. That meant the practical set seen in the plate was not going to hold up, so we had to essentially build that whole section of the ship in CG. This was an example where with one change came a lot of bigger changes. But with careful planning, we were able to get it out on time.”
“Those sorts of changes happen all the time with creatures,” reaffirms Ansari. “Normally when you first get the first plates in, you have to make some tweaks, but then the next set of changes may also come in when you start animating, when you start the choreography of things. Again, that’s exactly what happened with the Aeschna.
Here, the Aeschna had been designed to have a short, stubby neck. However, once modeled and rigged to follow the design, the shape language between the neck and its oval head meant that, as Ansari describes, “if you bent the head a certain way, it looked like a viper or more snake-like. That wasn’t quite the look we were going for. So, we made a couple of design changes there internally. Another thing we changed were the original claw designs so that the Aeschna could grab the sides of the boat in a certain way.”
“These sorts of changes are common, it’s just that they’re not not linear in any way,” adds Ansari. “You’ve got to be prepared. One thing that I like to do on all of my shows, especially creature shows, is to put a lot of time into sandboxing. I’m a very good doomsday prepper. I really look at the worst case scenario of what could possibly happen. You can’t see everything coming, but you can see a lot of the basics. Like, what would happen if this really cool shot that we think looks amazing ends up becoming a much closer shot? Are we prepared for our textures to be higher res enough? And 95% of the time, these changes will happen. It may not happen in that exact shot, but it will happen in another shot and you’ve got to be prepared for it.”
This is only part of the Aeschna story — read the full piece in issue #13 of the magazine!
