NewTek LightWave 3D® Brings Artificial Organs to Life in "Repo Men"
"Repo Men," is a Sci-Fi action-thriller based on the novel, The Repossession Mambo, by Eric Garcia. In this movie version of our future, humans have become dependent on expensive mechanical organs, created by a company called "The Union." Repossession agents are sent out to collect these organs when the customers can't pay their bill. The gruesome results of these encounters, and how they affect the parties involved, are cleverly presented with some great practical FX work that finds its genesis in LightWave 3D.
Since these repossessed organs played a fundamental role in the storytelling, the production crew needed convincing models that not only looked cool, but were also a believable piece of machinery. This particular task warranted a call to Andrew Clement, owner and founder of the LA-based company, Creative Character Engineering, to take on the responsibility of creating props for the hi-tech body parts.
A LightWave user since version 4, Andrew's CG work can be seen in TV shows like, "Hercules" and "Xena" and the feature film, "Blade." His practical FX work can be seen on recent TV shows like, "Dexter" and "Grey's Anatomy," as well as feature films like, "Cloverfield" and "Star Trek."
We were fortunate enough to speak to Andrew about LightWave 3D's involvement with the creation of the props, and he stressed the importance of making it part of his regular production pipeline. When we asked why, he had lots to say:
"LightWave is extremely easy to use. It has a full-featured modeler, solid animation tools, and what I think is the best bundled render engine out there. I usually do the CG work alone or with a small crew, and I'm able to get an extremely professional result, without a lot of mucking about. I can set things up myself from start to finish, and then choose how much tweaking I can afford, without wasting a lot of time up-front. Also, LightWave has unlimited render nodes, which means if you spend as much money as I do keeping a small studio afloat, with the dozens of small software licenses that I need to keep current, having free render nodes is a big deal!
The process in creating these models starts in LightWave 3D, where Modeler's ability to determine the proper sizing of the material comes in handy, so that its eventual 3D print will be accurate, down to the millimeter. "It was a definite time-saver. Because I built these models in LightWave, I could separate each organ into parts that I could print individually," says Clement, "and I knew they would fit together easily, and perfectly. It made building the more complex organs a much easier task than it would be, if I were to just start sculpting and testing."
Once the models, based off of the studio concept art, were built in LightWave 3D, the .obj files were then run through Right Hemisphere's Deep Exploration, to obtain the .stl files that would be printed out, re-molded, hand-sculpted for finer detail, and eventually plated and finished.
Each organ has a tiny barcode engraved on the main housing, about the size of a dime, but smaller. The challenge to create such fine detail without spending eye-straining sculpting time, was yet another quick-fix in LightWave 3D ."We had the images of the barcodes created in Illustrator," describes Clement, "and brought those into LightWave, where we extruded the shapes onto the model."
When asked about the future of this medium, Andrew had this to say, "From prototyping, to concept art, to asset delivery, it's all digital. Even though I love handcrafting something, I have no problem sitting down at a CG workstation when I need to. It's just another tool, especially now that I can translate what's onscreen to a tangible part."
