EYELINE breaks down the giant goldfish, and the dinosaur scenes, from season 2.
Netflix’s One Piece is a high-seas adventure that follows the irrepressible Monkey D. Luffy and his growing crew of Straw Hat pirates as they chase the ultimate treasure—the legendary ‘One Piece’—and the freedom to chart their own destinies.
Season 1 charted the crew’s formation and early voyages, with season 2 widening the journey, with the Straw Hats moving into stranger and sometimes more dangerous territory. That included, this new season, an encounter with dinosaurs and with a giant goldfish.
Behind the visual effects for those creatures was EYELINE. Here, befores & afters speaks to EYELINE visual effects supervisor Derek Spears and EYELINE CG supervisor Tosh Elliott about the challenges the goldfish and dinosaurs brought to the team, including anthropomorphism, scale, water and, yes, eyelashes.
Where do you start with a colossal goldfish, anyway?
One of the initial challenges with realizing the huge goldfish was finding the right fit into the world of One Piece. Of course, with the One Piece series being based on the original manga and anime, EYELINE’s build for the ‘Island Eater’ goldfish started with something that was originally 2D, but now had to be fleshed out for live-action. “The One Piece universe is fanciful, but not unrealistic,” notes Spears. “We had to find a way to design creatures that live inside this world that have all these exaggerated features that their world demands, but still make sure it serves a story, doesn’t bump people, and looks real enough to fit in the environment, even as odd and out of context as that might seem. That’s an interesting, but fun, design challenge.”
“We’re also so used to doing traditional visual effects where everything has to be as realistic as possible,” adds Elliott. “And so you have to take years of that experience, throw it out the window, and have to be more playful with it. So you get really embedded in the story as much as you do with the art and the history of visual effects as a whole.”
What helped was giving the goldfish a range of anthropomorphic features. “The goldfish has human-like eyes,” details Spears. “It has sclera. The teeth are actually human style white incisors with molars. You’ll find little hints and traces of human DNA all throughout our One Piece creatures.”
Scenes of the characters encountering the goldfish on the ocean were filmed on a mock-up of their ship, the Going Merry, largely against bluescreen. EYELINE was also given some plates shot in Costa Rica that were offshore looking towards the beach of the island the characters are leaving. Ultimately, most of the ocean was digital. Several water simulation set-ups were then used for the ocean water, goldfish water interaction and drips. “We had a 3D ocean built in Houdini, but predominantly we used Flowline sims for the water for the goldfish,” outlines Elliott. “We ended up with around 32 different layers of simulation for that. We used lots of layers of fine mist and spray, runoff, even the aeration around the base of the fish after it had risen to really help sell it.”
Spears says that the scale of the water was one of the toughest aspects to pull off. “We all know what big water looks like. You see a big waterfall, you know that’s how high that is. You have an instinctive feel by how slow and how fine the particulate matter is. Well, we intuitively know goldfish are small. So immediately we were fighting a battle. You’ll see in a lot of the wide shots we have the Going Merry in there. That’s a visual cue. The water flowing very slowly and lots of it, that’s another visual clue. We intentionally went for a lot of white water for this look because if there was not white water, it tends to look smaller. So, we made a lot of visual choices that way to help sell the scale.”
For the goldfish’s surfacing, EYELINE looked to make its enormous scales appear wet and flowing. The whitewater helped with this, but, notes Spears, the team “also created a bumpy wet shader as a very ‘cheap’ way to get the sense of flowing and give us some more fine detail along it. It adds an extra sparkle underneath. It feels like there’s something moving without actually being able to figure out what it is. It felt like there was something missing when we were looking at the composite, so it was a detail we added late in the process.”
“It was definitely a journey with our modeling and surfacing artists,” continues Elliott. “They did a fantastic job because the challenge there was, you’ve got to add a lot of detail, right? The micro level detail, the fine bump, and we did a lot of work on the sculpt itself. Then because it’s a fish, you have sub-surface on it, which immediately wipes out a lot of that detail. Then we threw water all over it and hid most of that detail! So, sadly, you don’t always see all of it, but we know it’s there.”
Dinosaurs…with eyelashes?
Earlier in the series, the Straw Hats encounter several dinosaurs—brontosauruses and a Tyrannosaurus rex—even riding the brontos at one point. For these scenes, plates were filmed in two locations, Costa Rica for jungle backgrounds, and buck plates for the riding scenes shot in South Africa.
The buck itself was a relatively small shape for the actors to sit upon, painted the same color as the CG brontosaurus would eventually be textured. For EYELINE, an early challenge was to marry scenes that were filmed in South Africa with those shot in Costa Rica. “Not only were they shot in two different parts of the world, they were shot in very, very different lighting conditions,” shares Spears. “Costa Rica weather is notoriously difficult. It does not want to cooperate. It was overcast a lot and there were storms. Where we had very direct sunlight on one side of the plate, we had to mimic that on the other side through a lot of work in compositing, trying to find highlights of the plates and bringing them up.”
Tying the brontos into the jungle further required EYELINE to rebuild foliage in order to avoid having to roto plate leaves so that the dinosaurs could be positioned behind plantlife. “We’d create either matte paintings, or the environment team would give us 3D bits of foliage that we could stick over the top, then put the brontos behind,” discusses Spears. “Then comp went in and added a bunch of mist to give the whole thing some depth.”
In terms of animation, the brontos were initially mostly static in the shots. This prompted EYELINE to animate them with a range of extra movements, as Elliott breaks down. “We thought, how do you make them feel they’re actually alive? We came up with this idea of a giraffe chewing leaves off a tree. So we had to go in and try and investigate what were the trees in the plate. We then did a bit of investigation on what kind of trees grew locally so that we could create those in 3D. Then it gets into a question of scale of leaves, because you don’t want the leaves to be too big, it throws off the scale of the dinosaur.”
Another trick in staging the bronto scenes, relates Spears, was realizing them at different scales. “We found out that what made the bronto look good from a wide shot at a certain scale did not look good when they were riding on top of it. The head looked small and it just looked silly. So when they’re wide, the brontos are actually smaller than when you’re on top of them. It’s a much bigger bronto once they get on top.”
Like the goldfish, EYELINE brought the brontosauruses into more of a manga/anime feel to again anthropomorphize the creatures. This even extended to the dinosaurs’ eyes. “The brontosaurus has very human eyes,” marvels Spears. “Instead of having your typical reptilian type of eye, we have an eye with a sclera and a blue iris. I think it was Tosh who came up with the idea that we should put eyelashes on it. We thought the client would never like this. We sent one with and without eyelashes, and they absolutely loved the eyelash idea! It’s just one of those little things where you take something that’s a reptilian creature, not even mammalian, and you bring it a little bit closer and make it a little more human and relatable. That’s the fun part of this world.”
