Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1438374
10 cgw o c t o b e r • n o v e m b e r • d e c e m b e r 2 0 2 1 in Melbourne involved face replacements, craing digital horses (with a rider dis- mounting into battle), the brother-sister face-off at the gambling club, and set exten- sions. But, its main work entailed creating the look for the rings seen throughout the film, including four main sequences span- ning the opening shots to the end battle. The base ring asset was modeled by hand in Autodesk's Maya, while Adobe's Substance Painter was used extensively for texturing, along with Chaos' V-Ray for shader work and rendering. The rings had rig controls to discreetly tweak their shape and scale to fit onto Wenwu's arm, which was also re-created in CGI during a number of shots, allowing the artists to tune the amount of deformation and contact between the rings and the skin. The ring powers were much more chal- lenging to generate than the base ring asset, however. "We tried to use elemental forces as much as possible as a basis for the vari- ous ring effects, to make it feel natural even though it was fantastical," says Townsend. "There's also a lot of logic and a sense of grounding to them." Method was involved early on with look-dev for the ring effects — which, says Townsend, was a very long, ongoing process, as the group dialed up and down their strength and subsequent elemental effect. Eventually each ring had a different effect depending on which ring power was in use at the time. According to Joshua Simmonds, VFX supervisor at Method Melbourne, the first hero shot of the rings leaving Wenwu's arms in close-up was staged to display their otherworldly beauty and power as energy forms between the rings, suggesting a pow- ering up. "They need to dangle around the character, and then when they're activated, they rise up the forearm to become equidis- tant along the forearm," he explains. The ring shield effect — which Wenwu creates to defend against the raining arrows during the castle attack — was much more challenging, Simmonds adds. This was due to the speed at which the conqueror is moving on horseback, combined with the extreme whip-like motion of the rings, resulting in a lack of visual clarity in the sim- ulations based on the individual rings. The solution, he says, was found by combining world-space simulations with local space, which were then motion-compensated to connect it all back again. Effects and lighting contributed many render passes to the compositors for fine detail control of color and intensity. In all, 30 effects elements, both physi- cal-based and emissive, were used by com- positors to achieve the final effect, which also included collisions from airborne arrows. Method's sequences further required a digital version of Wenwu, which was based on detailed scans and texture references. Many of the shots involved CG forearms and hands for the ring integration. The arms had a full muscle and skeletal system, while the artists used SpeedTree (from Interactive Data Visualization, recently acquired by Uni- ty) to grow the veins down to the capillary level for use with subdermal glow effects. The animators also generated crowds by feeding a large volume of in-house motion capture into Method's custom (SideFX) Houdini Crowd system to form the basis of the crowd shots. The crowd data was then passed from Houdini to Maya via a light- weight USD wrapper, which in turn rendered a custom procedural in V-Ray leveraging the Houdini Engine. In addition, Method's custom Maya Vignettes system enabled the auto-simulation of clothing and hair for crowd shots that required specific place- ment of action by animators. "Our crowd system made use of Houd- ini's robust dynamics to simulate physical reactions to impacts, which could in turn be promoted to Maya animation rigs for further performance refinements, including higher-quality cloth and hair simulation," explains Simmonds. As for Wenwu's battle costume, it had complex, multi-layered clothing underneath armor, presenting challenges with tailoring in Marvelous Designer's soware as well as with cloth simulation. His long hair also required the placement of hundreds of guide hairs, which were then groomed with multiple tools to match the on-set hair. This CG hair was further used to augment the plate when Wenwu didn't have bluescreen coverage. The Bamboo Forest—Scanline Continuing the flashback, Wenwu sets his sights on his next target, the mystical land of Ta Lo, when he encounters the beautiful Li, who is guarding the village entrance. The two engage in an elegant, poetic, ballet-like martial arts battle set amid a tranquil CG bamboo forest built by Scanline VFX. The studio also created the sequence involving a chase through the forest when Shang-Chi escapes from his father's compound later in the film during an attempt to reach the hidden Moon Gate that opens into Ta Lo. Scanline delivered 201 shots across those two sequences. During the "love fight" between Wenwu and Li, audiences are shown how the two first met and are introduced to their respec- tive superpowers of the rings and qi, in- volving the vital life force of any living entity. Scanline's work required combining full-CG shots with plate integration and digital set extensions for the bamboo forest, as well as with complex paint and roto rig removal. The studio also created various simulations driven by the superpowers, along with sec- ondary sims for swirling dust and leaves — extensions of Li's movements — as the fight plays out. There was also bamboo splinter- ing and breaking from the ring power. The artists used the studio's Flowline and Houdini for the various simulations, as well as Autodesk's 3ds Max and Maya, and Foundry's Mari and Nuke, for the assets, lighting, and compositing. Scanline's Jessica Harris, digital effects supervisor, notes that any of the CG they added had to feel natural, even if it was moving in an unnatural way. The set contained a pool of water, large kapok trees, and one layer of bamboo trees. For the environment build, the artists had three main layers of forest — a foreground layer that lined up with the edge of the set, a mid-layer, and a background layer. That was augmented with hero trees and plants inside the set, in addition to bamboo trees, to make it feel as if the clearing was at the center of a vast, dense forest. "Our artists did a fantastic job making this magical environment feel rooted in the real world. They were able to achieve a very organic look even though the movement of the leaves, trees, and dust were driven by a mystical force," says Harris. As a matter of fact, the team built an environment that could be used for both of the bamboo forest sequences in the film. Overall, it consisted of 600,000 trees and 15 different plant species. Millions of leaves were involved; tree leaf counts ranged from 200,000 leaves up to 14 million per tree. "It added up quickly, depending on the shot and