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Hollywood’s affinity for dogs is well documented. There is a long list of critically acclaimed artists starring
with the world’s most popular pet. I’m sure we can all remember a hilarious situation involving a down-on-his luck
detective and his faithful partner ‘pooch’, ‘buck’ or ‘killer’. I’m happy to say that Good Boy takes dog stars to a
whole new universe - literally - by touching on the age old question of the existence of intergalactic dog supremacy?
One thing, though, is abundantly clear: the digital effects created by Rainmaker and their team of artists are
out of this world!
Good Boy is about young Owen Baker, whose summer job as a dog walker affords him the opportunity to adopt his very own dog. To Owen's suprise,
the dog he chooses - cutely named Hubble - is an interplanetary scout from the dog star Sirius. Working with dogs
creates obvious problems from a production standpoint. It is one thing to get a dog to sit, stay or roll over. It is entirely
different to get them to speak in full sentences, or navigate advanced space craft, etc. That is where Rainmaker
came to the rescue.
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Rainmaker had a number of unique issues to deal with, most revolving around the fact that the dogs needed to speak. Since there
was no way to achieve this effect practically, they called on a healthy mix of 3D and 2D to get the look just right. With the
aid of a lossless HDRI file format, originally proprietary to ILM called OpenEXR, Rainmaker was able to bring in CG speaking
muzzles rendered out of NewTek’s, Lightwave into to Fusion to get the CG integration into live action look just right.
Digital Supervisor, Jason Dowdeswell explains that the “OpenEXR render format gave us a new level of flexibility to dramatically manipulate color information of rendered images within our composites.
OpenEXR and Fusion provided us with a way of retaining all of the out of range color values for tweaking later, preventing us from having to
re-render time consuming fur passes in CG to adjust for densities." Jason made it abundantly clear that every second counts when dealing with 467 FX
shots. "Having all of the information available to us with one render pass saved valuable seconds, helping us meet our already strenuous deadlines”
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At its peak, the DF compositing pipeline consisted of 15 compositors working swing shifts on 6 workstations. Every week they needed to produce an average
of 20+ shots to meet the production quotas. So at any given time, they had 50 shots on the go in various stages of development. The compositing team
also had access to a DF Render Farm; at the height running 26 processors being shared at any given time between the 6 DF workstations. The most
expensive Fusion renders were 22 minutes a frame but on average came in at roughly 4 to 6 minutes a frame. The average flow had about 16 loaders
pulling 2K Cineon files, though the high-end flows pushed 40 loaders. "Basically the render farm and our advanced network allowed for monster
throughput making the Cineon renders manageable.”
The compositing duties were split between Fusion and Discreet’s Inferno, and approximately 350 of the 467 shots passed
through Fusion for treatment of varying sorts. The volume DF is capable of handling was the primary reason Fusion was
brought on just before Good Boy went into post, that and the need for a warping function that happened to be a new feature in
the release of Fusion 4 late last year. “DF’s grid warping function was very necessary to the process of integrating
the talking CG muzzles with the live action dogs.”
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As described above, the bulk of the DF shots involved match-moving the CG muzzles. Grid warp and motion track were necessary to some degree on almost
every shot, and detailed color correction was used to get the 3D to match the background plate. Rainmaker found themselves rebuilding the background plate
early on, to ensure that the plate was clean. The clean plate was necessary for removing unwanted parts of the real dogs, a process essential to having
CG integration look just right, and was done by using Fusion's advanced tracking algorithms and paint tools.
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Fusion’s power lies in its dynamic balance. The power to complete 350 + diverse effects shots, the stability to get
the weekly quotas submitted on time and the flexibility to integrate into the pipeline quickly and efficiently, in this case
providing a real solution for profitable film effects. Fusion’s role as a compositing backbone for everything from
film to motion graphics, a render manager, a client session tool or mobile solution for field comps and FX tests are well
documented and help to define the nature of the DF solution: infinite processes for infinite artistic styles.
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For more information on Rainmaker make sure to visit their website at
www.rainmaker.com 
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