Digital animals serve as extras in Evan Almighty.(USER FOCUS: CG MODELING)

Rhythm & Hues, calling on its previous experience with creating realistic CG animals, generated a cast of thousands of CG birds, mammals, and other members of the animal kingdom, for the modern-day Noah's Ark tale, Evan Almighty. Meanwhile, CafeFX created some amusing CG fish for a comedic scene in the movie.

The visual effects facility tapped Massive, an artificial intelligence-driven animation system, to build large establishing shots of hundreds of lifelike computer-generated animals paired two-by-two as described in the biblical story of Noah's Ark.

Evan Almighty stars Steve Carell in a reprise of his role as newscaster Evan Baxter from the 2003 release Bruce Almighty. In Evan Almighty, Baxter is a newly elected congressman who moves his family from New York to suburban northern Virginia. His life gets thrown into a tailspin when he meets God, played by Morgan Freeman, who instructs him to build an ark. Mayhem ensues when this new venture takes over his life, career, and family.

The movie features a number of shots that set the scale in terms of the quantity of animals that are wrangled to board the ark. These shots were captured with several real animals on set, but not nearly as many as would be required in the final image sequences. Mark Welser, Massive Software supervisor at R&H, oversaw the creation of thousands of creatures, each milling about with behaviors appropriate to its respective species.

"We were able to populate scenes both inside and outside the ark, and fill in terrain with animals that are indistinguishable from hero characters and live animals shot on bluescreen. Massive Software has terrain adaptation and the ability to command navigation so that we could steer the creatures where we needed them to go, and deliver the diversity of actions for the various types of species we needed to create," explains Welser.

In all, 269 types of unique animals were built into the Massive library set up for this project. Everything ranging from rabbits, badgers, and skunks to elephants and giraffes were animated in Massive. "The tricky part of this assignment was that we needed large numbers of animals to move about randomly, coupled with having to place a number of those animals matched in slightly varied pairs of two--male and female--as told in the biblical story and as specified by the director. So we had to limit some of the randomness in the character placement in order to get animals paired up with others that had similar geometry."

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