So David, can you tell us a little about  this project?
 
I was lucky enough to be the visual effects supervisor on Marc Forster's The Kite Runner.
I took this project because I am a huge fan of Finding Neverland. I felt it was a wonderful film and besides kite runner being a great book - I wanted to work with Marc. We feel very blessed at cafefx being able to work with the top directors - and Marc definitely doesn't disappoint with this new film - which is his best work to date.  It was an incredibly fulfilling project, as we knew we were part of something wonderful and that motivated us to be a the top of our game.

That's nice David – as far as we know, cafefx is always on top of the game.

You used infiniMap Pro in production. How did you find out about infiniMap Pro?
 
I was introduced to infiniMap Pro by one of our artists who was working on the 3d landscape work. He said - "hey check this tool out - I think it is just what we need."  and so I downloaded the free version - did some tests and replied "Wow ! Let's get it! " others in the facility were also amazed when we told them what we were up to with infiniMap Pro and LightWave, and immediately started asking - when can we get that for maya and xsi  etc..   much better than mental ray map files etc..  and so little hit on the network and server resources.
FYI, there are no plans for a Maya or xsi version, but a new and better versions of infiniMap Pro and exrTrader are on the way.
  
What kind of machines do you use?
Most of our artists use dual cpu 2.66 gigahertz or faster systems with 4 gigs of ram.
These are being upgraded to quadcore systems with 8 gigs of ram as we speak.
We have roughly 800 cpus to render with.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank David and his team here for testing and making infiniMap Pro more scaleable.

What exactly did infiniMap Pro do for you?

For The Kite Runner – we had to build about 40 square miles of Kabul as seen from the air. Our camera was flying between 300 and 900 feet up in the air and could be looking in any direction. Our primary close-up hillside was created in Maya and at one point was 10 million poligons with hundreds of megabytes of textures. This was optimised along the way prior to final full res rendering. The surrounding areas – land and buildings, fields, trees were built in Lightwave with instanced geometry and landscape geometry and distant matte paintings. The matte paintings that covered the distant mountains and sky had approximately 40000 lines wide of resolution to hold up for wide shots as well as telephoto shots where we would be zoomed in on a small section of background. The land itself was mapped with a 40000 line resolution image as well, several layers including a snow coverage layer. There really wasn’t any other practical way to go about this other than use infiniMap and Lightwave.

To sum it up, half of our 3d layers for aerial kite shots were generated using infiniMap.

 

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