Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1144162
68 cgw s u m m e r 2 0 1 9 light effects, and everything else, so you're starting with very little and adding to it. In some cases, making the shots all-CG might have been easier. You don't get the nice interactivity that you do with stunt people out there, but just being able to control the scene from the beginning sometimes would have been a more expedient route." The final battle is filled with explosions, starting with the compound and continu- ing as Captain Marvel (ILM, to be exact) destroys Thanos's ship – all calling for large-scale simulations. "We wanted to push the envelope on that type of shot. In Winter Soldier, when the Helicarrier falls into the riv- er – we wanted to push that look and those effects further," says DeLeeuw, noting the battle scene in Endgame was an extension of that as well as the airport battle in Civil War. "The water sims and explosion sims [in Endgame] are light-years ahead of where we were just six, seven years ago in terms of what we were able to do." This time, however, there was little to no pre-production time to plan out the sequence, since this film was shot back-to- back with Infinity War. "Our pre-production time was occurring while we were shooting and also posting Infinity War, so we had a previs team going for Endgame and a postvis team going on Infinity War – around 60 people from The Third Floor working on both films at the same time," says DeLeeuw. "So, we took the final battle and just ran with it, always trying to give a little bit more." Make no mistake, visual effects carried this major battle. And in the thick of it all were two vendors in particular: Weta and ILM. Weta's first shot in the film is in the third act when Thanos destroys the compound, and culminates when Stark succumbs to his injuries. While the set was extensively dressed with a mixture of building rubble and burned-out tree stumps (the compound exists on the edge of the Hudson River surrounded by forest), when the sequences were cut together, the tree stumps played dominant, making it feel as if the battle was taking place in a bombed-out forest. So, Weta artists roto'd all the characters off the plates and replaced the set environment with a CG version that had more rubble and chunks of concrete and building, and "checked" the forest a bit. "Predominantly, the environment is CG throughout the sequence, and that turned out to be a blessing. It's a little extra work to get to that point, but once we were in that space, we could relight the environment and are not constrained by the lighting they got on set," says Aitken. "We can make it feel more like we are outside, with low lighting from a distant sun, and we can change the look of the environmental lighting from action beat to action beat. So, it's sunny at the start of the sequence, and then aer the compound is destroyed, it's overcast; there's a huge pall of smoke and dust hanging over the area. And when the portals open up, it becomes brighter again because we're playing the environment lighting to match the mood of the film." For the explosions, Weta extended the work it had done in War for the Planet of the Apes to create the destruction of the base at the end of the film, incorporating volumetric pyro physics and modeling the transfer of heat into its simulations for a more physically correct and realistic result. Weta also employed its crowd simula- tion soware, Massive, developed origi- nally for The Lord of the Rings, to populate battle scenes with tens of thousands of soldiers. "There were a lot of CG shots that required camera animation," says Aitken. "There's a shot when the two armies clash with each other at the start of the battle. It's a big, complex shot, and it lasts for quite a while. It's one of the longest shots we produced. There are plate elements in the shots, but essentially it's a CG shot that easily could have gotten muddled. Instead, our animation team on that shot produced something that is spectacular and also very easy to watch. You know where you're supposed to be looking at any one time. That's a real art." C H A R A C T E R S T O T H E R E S C U E In addition to Thanos, Weta also craed Iron Man's Nano suit, having a history with the character all the way back to the first Avengers film. "It's interesting to look at the way he has progressed over time. We've been doing different suits for him each time," says Aitken. "He's got a new suit in Endgame, which includes some of the same Nano tech he was deploying in Infinity War, but he took a beating, so he built this new suit that has far more armor plating, more like the solid-steel plate suits of the original Iron Man." Weta also did some Hulk work for the first time and shots of Thanos battling Cap, Thor, Iron Man, and Captain Marvel at the end of the movie. And, the artists did the Scarlet Witch, who amped up her power in this film. THE BATTLE IS FILLED WITH DIGITAL CHARACTERS AND COMPLEX VISUAL EFFECTS.