Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1503172
a p r i l • m ay • j u n e 2 0 2 3 c g w 1 1 formance 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 companies 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 other 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 shiing to USD [Universal Scene Description]," he adds. "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 massive Arête struc- ture. "The instancing is built uniquely just for that one asset," Wil- liams 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," he concludes. "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." Kendra Ruczak is the Managing Editor of CGW. The Wētā animation team relied on Maya for keyframe work and Massive for crowd sequences. The Wētā team used Nuance for motion capture processing.