'Starship Troopers 3: Marauder': The CG Bugs Are Back in Town

It's been 11 years since director Paul Verhoeven rocked sci-fi cinema with his cheesy, gory take on outer space warfare against a species of brutal, gigantic, human-crunching "bugs." The franchise never left the consciousness with direct-to-DVD releases and the latest is Starship Troopers 3: Marauder. It brings back Casper Van Dien as a more mature Johnny Rico still battling the "bug" infestation which has only gotten worse.

Behind the scenes, director/writer Edward Neumeier hired Visual Effects Supervisor Robert Skotak to run his show and Roger Nall took on the more specific tasks of digital effects supervisor creating a new generation of "bugs" for film.

"We, of course, were all big fans of the first movie," Nall says of his digital effects team. "When we had the opportunity to be involved we were excited! And then you look at it and you have to live up to that [original]. We started referencing the original from the very beginning and tried to hold true to that as much as possible within budget and time constraints. We spent a lot of time going over the first movie and in fact pull out selected chucks of selected bug motions. I had all the animators roto over the original Phil Tippett animations so we could match exactly what they were doing -- exactly - and we could have a feel for what Phil created."

Starship Troopers 3: Marauder is a sequel more in keeping with the original, so Nall explains that their mandate was to honor the past as much as possible, but freshen everything up.

"Ed [Neumeier] didn't have a great concern with changing the warriors specifically," Nall explains. "There are some new bugs in there within the constraints we had. That said, Ed wrote a script where the bugs have a different approach than they do in the first film where the bugs overwhelm [the soldiers]. In this movie, they have been in battle 10 years so they have a better understanding of the bugs. The movie begins on a planet occupied by the bugs but [the soldiers] have fences and trenches to help defend themselves against the bugs. The setting is a little different. Also, we decided at some point that there is a sequence where the bugs corral a couple characters. We decided to leap off from that and give the bugs a little bit of individuality and intent. In the first movie the bugs are like bugs but now there is the sense the bugs have a chance to stop and communicate with one another. There is a plan afoot."

Of course, the original Troopers film had a Hollywood theatrical budget and this sequel did not so the challenge from day one was achieving the look needed and wanted for much, much less.

"We weren't brought in on the show until after they were done shooting," Nall explains. "Robert Skotak initially contacted us in November the year before they shot with a little prep and discussion. There was some talk of previs. In point of fact Robert, who was the visual effects supervisor on the show and was in Africa when they shot, and Ed and us (to a lesser degree) spent an enormous amount of time storyboarding the movie. There was a design for what was going to happen. Most of the movie you could previs it, but it wasn't all that necessary. It wasn't a direct interaction that required a lot of complicated pre-visualization. It was mostly traditional storyboard prep. So we didn't start in earnest until July of 2007 and it was delivered in March of this year. We had a very trim crew that totaled about 25.

"Robert did a great job of managing. From when he got back from Africa we realized the scope was going to be larger than we expected so he immediately started parsing out work. It was organized and not a complete catastrophe," he laughs. "We were tasked almost entirely with any CGI creature design. We did all the arachnids and the whole Marauder sequence. Excluding the Marauder sequence, we had about 350 to 360 shots. The Marauder sequence was another 100 shots and then there were about 150 other shots from other companies that incorporated space ships, a sequence around a puppet bug. The wire removal and monitor inserts was spillover and another company took care of all of that.

"And as coincidence happens in every version of the movie, we rebuilt the bugs again," Nall continues. "The "bugs" were originally done in Softimage and Maya for the second one. We did them in Cinema 4-D and had to build them from scratch. We built two major versions of the bug -- a higher detailed one and a much lower poly, much lower detailed one for the swarms. There were a couple of different rigs. Some were very simple that would do the walking with a lot of automated procedures that make the attack arms balance and that automated the walk cycle. There were other rigs that were more complicated where everything had a controller so we could hand animate and some were built for climbing and for attacking. Now to get the performance out of it -- it's still a bug -- Phil had what was called "the threat display" that the bugs do before the attack. We went off of that when they rear up and they howl at times. We used our most complicated rig so there were plenty of controllers for that and there was the right attitude. They don't have eyes that are very visible and no brow so it's all done by posture and position.

"We've been using Cinema 4D here for a long time. We also have [Autodesk's]Maya and dabbled in [New Tek's] LightWave and another guy loves XSI [from Softimage]. Early on when we understood what the budget and time were going to be, I put my foot down for [Maxon's] Cinema 4D simply because I can make things very fast in there. It doesn't have quite all the tools of Maya but it's designed that one operator can do everything that needs to be done. The guys I have in here are more generalists, sometimes they had to light or texture in addition to animating. I'm also very pleased with the render out of Cinema 4D. All those things together made it possible to do those shots."

With this being a DVD release, Nall says they were able to keep to the violence of the first film. "We did try to be true to the first movie. It follows the path of the same brutal brutality. I don't think we have as many onscreen kills as the first movie but some of that is predicated by the story itself. In the first movie, we needed to kill off characters. In this one, we don't need to kill off nearly so many. We came into it very excited to match what Phil had done. That was the first challenge and then when we added on the Marauder sequence so everyone was excited about doing something new. Plus doing power suits and the idea of having a weapon that can finally beat the bugs was very exciting."

Detailing the Marauder sequence, Nalls says, "There is a segment at the end of the movie where they bring out the Marauders which attack the bugs. It was going to be done with a different technique but it was decided that we would do it all as a 3D element with Marauders almost entirely CGI. For that we had storyboard, we made a very rough animatic with a quick model of the marauder which was still being designed. It was an add-on with not a lot of time. But the Marauders is five minutes of us."

Tara Bennett is an East coast-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as SCI FI Magazine, SFX and Lost Magazine. She is the author of the books 300: The Art of the Film and 24: The Official Companion Guide: Seasons 1-6.