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FILMMAKING www.postmagazine.com 19 POST MAY/JUNE 2023 "The character work is really fun, and it's sort of glamorous, but the destruction work is as critical in a lot of ways," Williams notes. "If we decide that we want to move an explosion in the background of a shot so we have a better silhouette — and we do that after we've done all of the effects work — what starts to happen is you have to re-instance that entire area that you de-instanced, and then de-instance the new area. "It's not just a matter of moving an explosion over," he continues. "There is a lot of work that goes into it. Mike and his team worked diligently to make sure that we locked down as much as we could, so we weren't redoing a lot of effects work." Fields of debris Wētā set the stage for the third act's breathtaking battle sequence by crafting complex outer-space environments dotted with dazzling stars and neb- ulae. A seemingly-endless field of debris scattered by the destruction of the Arête also accentuates the interstellar landscape. "Instead of just letting effects run its course and create a lot of debris, we wanted it to be instanced so we could have a ton of it," Williams explains. "We also wanted it to be very bespoke, because we got close to it." The team began modeling the debris and identified a debris field that the characters would interact with and fly through. Due to the size of the Arête, the debris pieces measured between 400 and 500 meters in diameter. "We had these large pieces of debris, but then as we put spaceships amongst them, we realized we needed smaller pieces," Williams recalls. "We cre- ated stuff that was around the size of school buses and houses, five to 20 meters across." In a key ending sequence between Quill and Warlock, the characters interact with even smaller pieces of debris. "We had to create a third set of debris that would range from the size of a bolt, up to one or two meters," Williams adds. "By the end of it we had three full sets of debris builds. We probably had 30 or 40 pieces in each build." The team created a layout for the debris fields. "That layout would be passed to Mike and his team to strip out a magic carpet if they wanted to do something bespoke," Williams continues. "Mike would go in and clear out the area, and then put in the debris he wanted to, so he could choreograph to it. Tools of the trade The VFX team relied heavily on Houdini to com- plete the film's effects work. "We might have used a little bit of Loki here and there, but for the most part, it was all Houdini," Williams recalls. The team utilized Katana with an arsenal of in-house tools for lighting, along with Nuke for compositing. Manuka, Wētā's spectral-sensitive, physically-based renderer, also played an essential role in the process. The animation team used Maya for keyframe work and Massive for crowds. "We have a lighting tool called Gazebo that we can use in animation that runs inside of Maya in or- der to visualize lighting in realtime," Cozens explains. This tool was especially important for the Abilisk Pit sequence. "It has all these lighting reveals of the charac- ters," says Cozens. "James wanted horror-film light- ing, so we wanted to visualize that in animation so we could make choices about the performance." "Gazebo is our in-house realtime renderer," Williams adds. "Since we also wrote Manuka, which is our non-realtime renderer, Gazebo allows us to stay in parity so we could use the same lights and the two images will look very similar." Nuance, a motion capture processing tool, was another essential component of the animation team's workflow. "We've got a performance-capture stage across the parking lot," Cozens notes. "We can pick up takes, build shots out, and then bring that back over and keyframe on top of it. So we get the best of both worlds in terms of building performance accurately and quickly." Sharing assets Wētā completed character work on Rocket and Groot, and also delivered arm replacements for Nebula, sharing the workload with Framestore and other VFX vendors. "For shared assets, there's sort of a standard in the industry," Williams notes. "The joke is even though there's however many visual effects com- panies in the industry, for the most part, the top 10 or 20 companies all share artists — for lack of a better way to say it. "We're really good at working with each oth- er and supporting each other," he continues. "A healthy industry is a good industry. Whenever we pass something to another vendor or they pass something to us, there's an agreed upon set of standards. We're slowly shifting to USD [Universal Scene Description]. We can share a lot of things. We can share the full groom on Cosmo, we can share the joint positions on any creature. We can share the full models." The only asset that was not shared was the mas- sive Arête structure. "The instancing is built uniquely just for that one asset," Williams explains. "It's too much geometry to de-instance and pass. It would just be untenable. Pretty much everything else in the show was shared and shared successfully. If something doesn't come through right — if something hiccups a little bit — everybody here is more than happy to get on the phone and work through the kinks." Wētā employed Houdini, Nuke, Katana and Maya, as well as proprietary VFX tools.