Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/135926
Visual Effects says. Thus, the animators would have had to show modelers what they wanted, and wait for the modeling and creature departments to create the assets they needed before they could animate each transformation. "It would have been incredibly cumbersome," Gilman says. "So we established a guide rig system that circumvents the traditional workflow. We could work on a non-referenced puppet, so animators could block all the animation without dealing with the other departments. We could generate controls on the fly. A chest panel could become four or five pieces that subdivide, slide, and break apart. Animators could do that on the fly without leaving their shots." Because the non-referenced guide rig had high-resolution panels attached to the joints, animators could be certain their cuts would work on the final models. The guide rig also made it possible for an animator to separate limbs from the puppet without creating two separate puppets. And, they could damage the suits without sending the suits to the character effects department. "It gave us an enormous amount of control," Gilman says. Once approved, the guide-rigged animation made its way into the standard pipeline, but having this alternate way of working made iterations on the way to approval faster and easier. Animators were also able to art-direct much of the destruction. "We built on the work we did for the destruction sequence in Tintin," Aitken says. "We set up events so they are physically believable and directable. A lot of work has gone into enabling animators to run simulations. Animators have simulation tools, so they can run explosions and rigid-body dynamic simulations. And, if they drop an object, it falls with gravity. A shipping container knows how heavy it is." In one series of shots, for example, an enormous crane collapses after an explosion breaks the moorings that held up the main deck, the boom arm. Animator Julia Chung created a 600-frame animation of the crane toppling from beginning to end. "It looked like a simulation," Gilman says, "but she animated it by hand." Once Williams, the supervisor on the shot, and Marvel approved the animation, the animators gave the master file to the effects team to run the simulation. At the peak of production, close to 40 animators worked on the shots, with the majority starting in mid-December. "We did 420 shots, a 20-minute battle, in three months," Gilman says. "That is not to be believed. But with our new technology development, it was a ride." …And More "Framestore did a major sequence with Iron Man confronting an extremis character," Townsend says. "Luma did great suit work. They did shots with Iron Patriot looking for Tony, creating full-digital versions of the suits that matched and intercut seamlessly with practical suits. Cantina did all our HUDs, taking those one or two steps further than the work they had done for previous films. Fuel did a couple sequences with holographic images. One was in Tony's war room where they created a wall of graphics as a hologram that was really interesting. They created something new but that related to what we accept and know. They also did a massive holographic brain that our characters get inside. It looks magical and beautiful." 26 ■ CGW M ay / J u ne 2 0 1 3 ■ SEVERAL of the 17 studios that worked on the film created Iron Man's Mark 42 suit. VFX Supe Chris Townsend made sure the suits looked the same and the damage was consistent even though different lighting and rendering packages were used. And, in addition to the beginning of the end battle, Cinesite did car comps. "I detest doing car comps," Townsend says. "They are one of the hardest things to do in visual effects and often done badly. You have nodding heads in a car and you can tell it's greenscreen outside. But they had light changing over faces, shadows, reflections, little camera bobs and weaves. They did a great job." Throughout postproduction, it was Townsend's job to maintain consistency among the many vendors, making sure extremis created in one studio matched extremis in another, that the Mark 42 looked like the same suit in every shot, albeit with increasing damage, despite the fact that the studios used different textures and renderers. "Of course they do," he laughs. "I wouldn't have it any other way." "It was very long hours for a long time," Townsend adds. "In the final three or four months, I had one day off and I was working 14-, 16-, 18-hour days. All the visual effects companies were working crazy hours to get what they needed in. It was brutal. But, the production team was incredible. Everyone at Marvel was full on. I saw the president, who is also a producer, in editorial at 2:00 in the morning. "There was a moment five weeks before the end of our postproduction schedule. I was on a FaceTime call with my 12-year-old daughter at 9:30 on a Wednesday night. My production manager poked her head in the door and said, 'We're going to a bar to celebrate.' I told my daughter I was going to go have a drink because we had just finaled the first 1,000 shots. We were halfway through. She said, 'Dad, you've been on the show for a year and a half and you only have a few weeks left.' I said, 'Yeah. That's why I'm going to have a drink.' We had five weeks to do full-CG environments, assets, digital characters, full-screen in-your-face shots – tremendously hard shots. But we had 17 companies working furiously around the clock. Because we had spread the work and shared assets, theories, and techniques, we were able to get it done on time, on schedule. We finished on a Saturday night at 1:00 in the morning. It was incredible." ■ CGW Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for CGW. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net.