How To Train Your Dragon

INTERVIEW WITH MATT BAER - HEAD OF EFFECTS

1. As Head of Effects, what has been your biggest challenge on “How to Train Your Dragon?”

Scale and detail. The environments are huge so a lot of work was put into both fire, smoke, and the oceans to help sell the scale of the Dragon world – which in many respects required us to develop tools and shaders allowing us to get additional detail in both the simulations and render quality.

2. How did you come up with the fire effects for the dragons?

It was a collaboration between Directors, Craig Ring, Art, and the fx department.  We wanted the style of fire to match the unique personalities of the Dragons while at the same time having characteristics and behavior that felt like they all evolved from a central place.  Like many effects work, we’d pull together a bunch of reference to guide the process and let the fx developers put their spin on the look.

3. Where did you grow up and what is your favorite pastime?

I spent my JR High and High School years on Bainbridge Island, Wa. In addition to playing tons of soccer and tennis the remainder of my free time was spent outside or making movies. Many of our films focused on building dummies for some crazy stunt. I had a really low tech editorial setup in my basement where I connected 3 vcrs, 2 stereo systems, and one “state of the art” video cameras.

4. There are lots of water effects in “How To Train Your Dragon,” how did you handle those?

For the ocean surface we used a displacement shader that R&D wrote which allowed us to create everything from a calm to stormy ocean. The only simulations we used for the ocean were for boat wakes and ripples which were combined with the ocean shader at render time. Most of the hero splash shots were Maya particle simulations using custom fields and expressions to create fluid-like motion and shapes.  For rock splashes we instanced pre-simmed fluid sph sims.

5. How did you learn to do what you do with effects?

In order to get into the industry, I taught myself Softimage at a friend’s post house which allowed me to get job teaching and supporting animation software at Wavefront Technologies in Santa Barbara, CA.  It was there at Wavefront (and eventually SGI and Alias|Wavefront) where I learned all about CG from the  programmers, clients, and colleagues. It was a very collaborative group and they supported us in pushing our understanding and fundamentals the the entire CG process. For example, if you had a question about the renderer, the programmer would pull you into his/her office and explain everything on the whiteboard.  I’ve been fortunate to have a very similar experience at Dreamworks where everyone is sharing ideas and learning together.

6. Does 3D have an impact on how you deal with the effects in a film?

Yes —  and I assume the impact will differ depending on the style of show. On Dragon, many of the 3D effects can be broken down to a layout challenge. Planning before the artist started was really important. The hope is if you can start a shot knowing that it will be a 3D effect, then you can design your effect to work compositionally in both 3D and 2D. Based on how we launched the artist would determine how often we reviewed their work in 3D.  Its been a learning process for us – now that there is depth involved,  we are working through how to get back to some of the 2D cheats that we used to use in the comp to plus and patch work together

7. What is your favorite film special effect?

My favorite movies as a kid were Star Wars and E.T. There are a few that stand out to me recently. I loved the FX in Children of Men because the fit so well into the story telling. The rollerskating freeway scene in the first Transformers is really fun. And for amazing fluid effects, the river god in Prince Caspian is incredible.

8. What was the first film you worked on?

While working at Wavefront, I moonlighted at Santa Barbara Studios doing fx work on Spawn.