Raising the Dragons by Sven Martin, PIXOMONDO

This talk was about how PIXOMONDO approached their project for the TV show, Game Of Thrones.

I chose to to go to this talk because I am a fan of the show and knew that it would be interesting to see how they created these 3D creatures in a realistic setting. They had a tricky time meeting the deadline, because there was a lot of work that went into scenes on the show so that was one of the problems they faced with this brief.

Before this talk, I had not heard of the company, PIXOMONDO, so attending the festival, generally has made me more aware of different types VFX, Animation and Game companies that exist.

PIXOMONDO is a visual effects company that creatively solves challenges for clients and partners located in Europe, China and the United States of America. They have worked on commercials, TV series, films, and live media productions such as 3D projection mapping, media installations and events.

http://www.fmx.de/program2014/event/3481

http://www.fmx.de/program2014/event/3481

Creating the Dragons

Client VFX supervisor: Rainer Gombos (worked on Season 2) and Joe Bauer (worked on Season 3)

VFX producer: Steve Kullback

• Concept & Design: They took reference images from alligator snakes, lava flowing for the colour to develop the skin for the dragon. To understand how the dragon would fly, they looked at skeletons and followed rules from real world physics and tried to build the models from inside out to understand it better as a whole. They looked at animals that fly to enhance their knowledge of the real world physics behind it. The model was then sculpted in Z-brush.
• Surface: Texturing and shading made a difference to the look of the dragons, also looking at      colour palettes to experiment with what colours the dragons would be as there were three. This is where looking at the lava flows affected their work, when the dragons would breath fire, their neck would light up to show the source of the fire. Turntables were created to see how the model looked in different light modes and see how the surfaces reacted with the lighting.
• Rigging: They purchased a dead chicken to understand how the wings and body would move. This is where they figured out that where the wings folded, so did the skin around that area, though it is subtle, it made a difference when it came to animating.  They also placed the chicken in different light situations.
• Animation: They played with ideas of how the baby dragons could behave on Khaleesi's shoulder. This proved difficult because the dragon was not going to be very active on the shoulder so they had to think of what it would do during that scene on her shoulder. They used bats flying as a reference for the dragons flying animations.
• FX: This consisted of wing simulation actions, using a colour grading system showed green means nothing is happening, red means squashed and blue means stretched. They used these colour keys for a displacement map which made it easier to adjust how the wings moved and what happened to the skin during this process.

With season 3 they had a lot of factors to consider, for example, the size of the dragons had increased in scale, since they grew.

They looked at more references of dragon like animals such as the fruit lizards, it meant now that changing the scale to a believable size was a problem they had to solve.