Vancouver F/X shop Image Engine Design has designed and animated a revolutionary 3D CG ‘actor’ for the season finale of MGM’s Stargate SG-1. The character, an alien named Thor with a rubbery epidermis and protruding cranium, had previously appeared on the series, having been shot as a puppet. The puppet had aged and Image Engine approached the producers of the locally shooting sci-fi series to digitally construct a new Thor that would allow the character a greater range of behavior.

‘We had been wanting to do this with Stargate for a while,’ says Image Engine VFX coordinator Lisa Turner. ‘We were there from the get-go, from conception meetings to online editing.’

The 3D actor interacts with human members of the cast in what the Emmy- and Gemini-nominated shop hopes is a seamless fashion. Thor appears in more than 75 shots, accomplished in a seven-week turnaround collaborating with series VFX supervisor James Tichenor. Thor is one of a whole race of Asgards, so the series can easily bring back a number of the aliens in the future if it wishes, as the character can be easily replicated in the digital domain.

To achieve Thor’s realistic basic movement, the series employed the Visualeyez 3D Motion Tracking Unit from Burnaby, BC-based PhoeniX Technologies. Image Engine’s 3D artists then provided cleanup and animated the character’s lip movement and emotive expressions. The biggest challenge was to then integrate the animated character into scenes with the actors. Making the results as real as possible required the shop’s R&D division, on the case since March 2000, to devise a proprietary renderer dubbed ‘Blue Ball’ to work with its Alias|Wavefront Maya 3D animation. All of the shop’s dozen artists contributed to the project, with Craig Van DenBiggelaar as VFX director and Kevin Little as FX supervisor.

Stargate has used several of B.C.’s leading F/X shops in the past, this season marking the fifth year of Image Engine’s involvement. The season finale, entitled ‘Revelations,’ airs in March on Showtime. Image Engine is gearing up for work on Jeremiah, a new MGM sci-fi series starring Luke Perry and currently shooting Vancouver.

-www.image-engine.com

-www.stargate-sg1.com

-www.ptiphoenix.com