Rhythm & Hues, who filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, is easily one of the leading visual effects studios in the world. Its latest venture, the extra-ordinarily filmed LIFE OF PI, won several awards this year including the coveted Best Director Oscar for Ang Lee. This visually-stunning adventure 3D drama created a new benchmark in the film-world because of its special-effects, which was highly praised by critics from all quarters and was appreciated by audience globally. Besides that, it picked up all the technical and visual-effects awards all over the world including Best Visual Effects award at the Oscars.
But the R&H studio that made all this possible, took help from a lesser known 3D scanning service bureau called LeaderTek from Taiwan, which enabled them to take advantage of 3D capture to bring out the amazing and beautiful effects on screen.
Ang Lee, who previously won the directing Oscar for his coming-of-age film BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN back in 2005, bagged the coveted prize once again this year for his visionary thinking and imagination behind this tale of massive proportions. The director hired R&H studios to come on-board in his mission to do something which is “next-to-impossible”. The studio having offices across many countries including Taiwan, Canada, India, Malaysia and the U.S took the technical responsibility of producing several visual effects shots that needed to be presented in 3D stereo.
The movie garnered rave reviews because of its large-than-life portrayal of Richard Parker, the Bengal Tiger, who many believed to be as good and as real as a “living-and-breathing” version of it in the real world. Apart from that, the water and skies which got digitally recreated were just stunning along with the floating raft, Meerkat Island and other additional creatures that made one to believe in a world which is something that is beyond the control of the humans.
LeaderTek used the laser scanner FARO Focus 3D to capture digitally the raft and the lifeboat. They chose the software of reverse engineering, Rapidform XOR, which was used to merge and optimize the data affiliated with point cloud scan and bring them together into an STL file. The software has the ability to combinine 3D scanning data process with CAD. Thus, it helps in creating feature based along with solid editable models with the environment of CAD.
LeaderTek’s Sales Engineer, Mr.Edward Yao was in full praise when describing the features of the Rapidform XOR. He hailed it to be the best and easily the most effective among its competitors, as it is capable of working with raw data in massive quantity along with Faro Focus 3D scanner, which easily makes him and the team very much satisfied and happy with the final outcome along with all the cine-goers around the world.