Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1358125
a p r i l • m ay • j u n e 2 0 2 1 c g w 2 5 ing is a CG Vision in a state of dismantle- ment at SWORD. A distraught Wanda leaves and is spurred to travel to Westview. There, she uses her powers to construct a home piece-by-piece on a plot of land Vision had purchased for them. In that sequence, executed by ILM, Wan- da not only creates their home, but also an intact Vision, and transforms Westview from 2023 to the 1950s. Wanda was filmed on an empty-lot set in Atlanta, and everything apart from her and the initial footprint of the house was created digitally by ILM. ILM's art department created the con- cepts for this sequence, which was brought to life in a collaboration between ILM's CG department and compositing teams. "Ini- tially, we plotted out the timing of the house being built as well as the composition of the magic in each shot. This meant starting early on in the extraction of the greenscreen photography of Wanda so as to place her in each shot with the blocked-out house geometry and a torus for where the magic would be at that point," she explains. The assets team modeled Wanda's house in 3D using Lidar and on-set photography as reference, then built both the internal and external structure, including the framework, plasterboards, pipe work, and brickwork. The internal components of the house were built using the 1950s set as reference. Each piece of geometry was separate so this could be used in effects. One of the important aspects of the house-building sequence is that Wanda's magic had to feel powerful and filled with grief. The sequence starts off with a grief bomb explosion. "Using Houdini, we started with a shockwave that pulses out from Wanda to set the outer wall of the explo- sion. We then built a particle system inside the dome that pushes out with incredible force and clumps together to form tendrils," DeMarco explains. "To sustain the energy flowing out of Wanda, we were constantly emitting particles from her chest and hands, and pulling this through curves towards the edges of the FX dome area." In Houdini, the house was split into sepa- rate sections – structure, plasterboard, win- dows, and so on – so that parts of the house could form independently. Separate setups were used for parts of the house flying in and for parts of the house being "born." The "flying in" setup followed a similar trajectory to the vortex force field around Wanda. Here, curves were also used to set the basic shape and direction the magic would flow. The curves start at Wanda's hands and flow into a circle that represents the size and position of the vortex. By setting the activation along these guide curves, the artists would control where and when the magic would appear. The house model was fractured into cubes that were heavily inspired by House of M's comic artwork, whereby the building blocks appear as tetris/jigsaw 3D blocks. To realize this, the artists pre-fractured the entire house into blocks and used a growth solver to spread the activation of each of those blocks within a point cloud. As soon as the pieces become active, they started moving toward their final size and position. The active house pieces were then used as a source for Wanda's red magic. The house was rendered in Foundry's Ka- tana, and to create the illusion of the exter- nal structure in color and the internal com- ponents of the house in black-and-white (for the 1950s era), this was done in comp using AOVs passed from lighting. Addition- ally, the ILM generalist and environments teams created Blondie Street surrounding Wanda's house – this being a mixture of 3D and 2.5D projections, again created using Li- dar and on-set photography. The shrubbery was created using SpeedTree's foliage and vegetation soware. During the iterative compositing process of developing the creative look of the magic and house building in CG, ILM developed looks and setups to apply in comp to add extra lev- els of complexity – specifically the glitchiness that was prevalent in the show's overall style. "A lot of fun was had figuring out ways to essentially 'break' the beautiful renders that we were being passed," says DeMarco. Integrating the photography of Wanda into the scene was helped greatly through the use of deep compositing, which allowed the artists to place her among the magic and have all the different elements move both in front and behind her. "Since this was the first time we see the 'chaos magic' in the show, a lot of the look development in FX and comp was about finding a balance between what we're used to seeing with Wanda's magic and something more omi- nous and powerful," DeMarco notes. "This Glitchy textures reminiscent of imagery from old, broken TVs were used for various VFX throughout. Rodeo created the sequence when Vision exists the Hex and disintegrates.