Customer story from the SIGGRAPH 2005 Softimage Magazine

CG artists at Hybride work eleven months, contribute 735 shots, 54 minutes, and go “A to Z” with SOFTIMAGE|XSI to achieve Frank Miller’s darkly surreal world on film. Hybride handled modeling, texturing, animation and more.

SAINTS IN SIN CITY:
Hybride Artists Play CG Saints on
Robert Rodriguez’s SIN CITY

By Michael Abraham

“Hybride has brought yet another of my fevered dreams to life,” says director Robert Rodriguez breezily. “We’ve been working together for a while now, but this project was unique. For SIN CITY, we had to be faithful to the bold imagery of Frank Miller’s graphic novels, but we had to take that cutting-edge look several steps beyond. Time and again, the Hybride artists are able to create images that we mere mortals can only imagine.”

For about seven years now, Rodriguez – the mad mind behind such films as the now legendary El Mariachi (1992), Once Upon A Time In Mexico (2003) and the Spy Kids trilogy (2001-2003) — has been having his unique imaginings realized by the equally daring creative minds at Hybride, the Piedmont, Quebec-based animation and effects house that is showing Hollywood how things can be done. In recent years, Hybride has made extensive use of SOFTIMAGE|XSI in bringing Rodriguez’s visions to the screen, and the largely black and white world of SIN CITY is no exception:

“For our work on SIN CITY, we used XSI from A to Z,” says Hybride Visual Effects Producer Daniel Leduc. “We created 735 shots in 45 environments for SIN CITY and all the modeling, animation, textures, lighting and so on were completed in XSI. Only this system gave us the flexibility and versatility we needed on a truly diverse project like this one.”

And what a project! Unless you are extremely unlucky, the world of Miller’s SIN CITY will bear little resemblance to your own. This is a world of lead-hearted hookers and bone-crunching behemoths; of woman-beating cops and girl-eating priests; of mouth-breathing monsters and…well…politicians. There are no good people in SIN CITY; there are only the bad and the slightly-less so.

THE HARD GOODBYE

Take Marv, for instance, the central character of “The Hard Goodbye”, the first of the three Miller books that comprise the film as a whole and the main portion of the film (together with the open and close) to which the Hybride team dedicated their considerable talents. With his square jaw, buzz-cut and strength of ten and then some, Marv might seem at first like hero material, but his beast-like visage and booze-addled brain have made him decidedly anti. Make no mistake: there is no heart-of-gold beating beneath this barrel chest.

“Robert initially approached us about doing the entire movie,” says Leduc. “As it happened, we were just hitting the crunch on another film, Racing Stripes, so our schedule wouldn’t allow us to take on the whole movie. That turned out to be a good thing because Marv ended up keeping us very busy all on his own. I think Robert probably felt that this mostly black and white, very graphical movie would be easier to do than something that needs to be photoreal, like the Spy Kids movies. Robert usually believes things will be easier than they turn out to be, of course. Maybe that’s why his movies are always so ambitious.”

As “The Hard Goodbye” opens, Marv explains his current murderous motivations. Played with astonishing pathos by Mickey Rourke (an actor I personally wrote off over a decade ago), Marv is out to avenge the murder of Goldie, a high-priced call girl with whom he shared a single night and a blood-red, heart-shaped bed. Sounds sort of sweet, I guess, until Marv gets busy. Through a blood-spattered odyssey that would make even Quentin Tarantino blush, Marv blithely butchers his way through virtually every corner of Sin City. Indeed, one of the most distinguishing features of “The Hard Goodbye” is its multiple environments: hotel rooms, a church, alleys, buildings, statues, an electrocution chamber, a hospital elevator, a bathroom, a guarded fortress, and more.

“Creating and working with that many shots in that many different environments was a big challenge,” admits Marc Bourbonnais, Lead 3D Technical Director at Hybride. “On occasion, we had the same environment over as many as 30 shots, but usually we were changing sets every 10 shots or so. We had to find a way to optimize the production while knowing the workload would be so diversified. The versatility and flexibility of XSI let our artists work the way they felt most comfortable. Some of the CG backgrounds were matte paintings with a few 3D elements; others were completely 3D with full textures, modeling and lighting done in XSI.”

BLACK AND WHITE IN COLOR

Compounding the challenge of creating so many environments was the distinctive monochrome, with occasional accents of vibrant color, which essentially defines the film’s tone.

“We started our 3D work in black and white, but we quickly found out how tough that is,” explains Leduc. “We were trying to get all the details in black and white without losing the shading in the skin tones and other details. We did some preliminary tests in XSI to figure out the light and dark of the final look. You don’t want to spend too much time on the details of a portion that might be blocked out in the final cut. Eventually, we decided it was easier for everybody to work in color. When we turned the color shots into black and white, they created a much richer grey scale image. Sometimes, Robert complained that our backgrounds were too photoreal. We used XSI’s lighting tools to create non-realistic lighting.”

“It was that kind of blending of different styles that made SIN CITY such a challenge and such a successful project,” says Bourbonnais. “All the way along, we were trying to strike a balance between a realistic, film noir feeling and the harsh contrasts of the graphic novel. Throughout, we needed to keep the approach sufficiently flexible to know on a scene-by-scene basis what the 3D was going to look like.”

Bourbonnais pauses for emphasis, before continuing:

“The greatest thing about XSI on SIN CITY was the versatility it offered on all these different shots,” he says by way of conclusion. “On a unique project like SIN CITY, we had to give a lot of creative room to our artists. Usually when you start a new project, you need to set up a definite pipeline where certain artists working on certain areas. When you’ve got 40 people working on 700 very different shots, you need to give them tools like the XSI FX Tree that allow them to really stretch their imaginations and abilities. Some of the artists were more comfortable doing matte paintings, and they could do that in XSI. Some are more technically inclined, so they could use XSI to build their own scenes and sets and go right ahead with textures and lighting. The FX Tree allowed us to perform important pre-comp work. With the adaptability of XSI, it is easy to select different approaches for a scene, and you don’t need an army of technically-inclined staff to get the very best results possible.”

And no one, but no one, can argue with the results. Right now, Hybride is completing work on The Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava Girl in 3D, ready to add another Rodriguez project to their already astounding resume.

With the arresting artistry of SIN CITY alone, however, Hybride appears destined for CG sainthood.