Sicuramente sarà un'impiego "anomalo" rispetto a quello a cui siamo portati a pensare quando si parla di CGI nei film, ma nella pellicola "Il curioso caso di Benjamin Button", la Matte World Digital (MWD) ha pensato bene di sostituire le 29 digital matte paintings, necessarie alla rappresentazione di una stazione ferroviaria sita in diverse aree e a diversi stadi di deteroramento, con dei rendering 3D ad alto tasso di fotorealismo realizzati con l'engine di Next Limit, andando anche oltre le più rosee aspettative.

Vi propongo i dettagli raccontati dalla viva voce di Ken Rogerson and Garrett Fry di MWD in queste prime esperienze di Maxwell Render in produzioni cinematografiche:
Citazione Originariamente Scritto da Ken Rogerson & Garrett Fry
“Rather than create 29 digital matte paintings to represent the train station in different eras and at various stages of deterioration, Barron (visual effects supervisor) and his crew opted to build one 3D station model that they could alter and age as needed. CG artist Luis Hernandez worked on interior modeling and lighting for the 3D set, and digital matte painter Garrett Fry massaged the renders to add aging effects. ‘We used Next Limit’s Maxwell as our rendering software,’ explained Matte World Digital visual effects producer Ken Rogerson, ‘which is used mostly for architectural visualization and product design. Architects might use it to show a client what a building will look like, based on accurate interior light bulb brightness and the effect of sunlight streaming through the windows, et cetera. A lot of renderers are meant to just render an image quickly to give you a good approximation of lighting, based on someone’s best guess. But we wanted something that would mimic real-world lighting, that would be physically accurate; and so we adapted that Maxwell software to our pipeline.’
“Using Maxwell, Matte World artists could quickly view their CG environment illuminated in any number of ways and from many different angles and sources. ‘We could render the effect of each light individually,’ stated Craig Barron, ‘in separate layers, as a 32-bit, high dynamic range file, so we could combine and re-combine the interior lighting any way we wanted. We could see what our shot would look like if it was lit only from the windows, for example. We rendered all the possible lighting sources, and then mixed and matched them for each shot, using sliders to match the set lighting. It was computationally intensive, at first, because we had to put the effort into rendering all those different lighting schemes; but once we had that, lighting or re-lighting a shot went very quickly because we could add or subtract the calculated effect each discreet light had on the environment without re-rendering the whole scene. It was a good solution for the train station interior because we had multiple shots in the same environment, each with slightly different set lighting to match to.’”
Fonte:
http://www.cinefex.com/
http://maxwellrender.com/

F.