The CG Treasure Chest

What is that Davy Jones?!!
After seeing "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Dead Man's Chest" for the second time, I still left the theater amazed...

ILM was showing off it's technical prowess during Siggraph 2006 at several events: Autodesk's AGUA, Pixar's RenderMan User Group Meeting, a few Siggraph technical sketches and at Lucasfilm's booth on the exhibition floor.

Though there's a huge amount of effects (digital and non-digital) throughout the movie, nothing strikes your eyes more than the über-villain Davy Jones. Most of ILM's presentations were focused of the hardships of making Jones come to life.

Davy Jones was played by the talented Bill Nighy. The captain of the "Flying Dutchman" is a half-man/half-sea monster being who haunts the oceans since the day he had his heart broken by an unsettled love affair.

Nighy was shot with a grey marker suit to give the CG team accurate light positioning and color temperature from the set. Though some make-up was added to his eyes and mouth for a "backup", Davy Jones is ENTIRELY CG throughout the movie.

ILM captured the actor's movements from his shot performance and relied heavily on keyframe animation to exaggerate his acting and animate his face and tentacles.

For those, ILM technicians created a dynamic setup that could simulate the physics of each tentacle with gravity, collisions and basic curvature; on top of the simulations the animators could select which parts of each tentacle would receive hand-animated keyframes, and which parts would remain simulated. On top of that, there was a system that allowed the animators to paint areas of the tentacles that would be "sticky", and how much "stickyness" they could have, so the tentacles would adhere to each other and to Jones' clothes, and detach depending on their speed and/or based on the animator's cue.































Jones is the captain of the "Flying Dutchman", a frightful sight that seems to be as much a part of the ocean depths as its cursed captain.










The ship was built to full scale as a set.
A digital replica was provided by ILM for several shots, which was extremelly accurate and provided its own rendering challenges.




The ship's crew was also created as CG characters. While some background crewmembers were shot with make-up, most of them - specially the main crewmembers - are entirely computer-generated throughout the movie using the same techniques as Davy Jones.

ILM used RenderMan to render all the CG elements in the movie.
One new RenderMan version 13 feature that was crucial for the production was its new ambient occlusion workflow that doesn't require expensive raytracing calculations.
During Pixar's RenderMan User Group Meeting, an ILM technical director was praising this new feature saying they would not have been able to render some of the most complex elements (such as the digital "Flying Dutchman") using current occlusion and global illumination techniques. ILM worked closely with Pixar on this issue, and RenderMan's "traceless" occlusion and color-bleeding features were polished for this current release (PRMan 13) as they were being used for the production of "The Dead Man's Chest".

Compositing for all the shots was split between Apple's Shake, Autodesk's Inferno and ILM's own Comptime and Sabre systems. ILM used its EXR format extensively throughout the production to maintain image depth and provide extended control to compositors through extra information added via RenderMan AOV render passes.
While the public waits for the next Pirates of the Caribbean (due 2007), Davy Jones and his crew set the new standards for believability and push the boundaries of CG art and technology for the next years.







Images are a courtesy of ILM and are ©Copyright Disney Enterprises Inc. and Jerry Bruckheimer Inc.