Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1540269
ed filling them out, and they started looking like marathon runners. They were a bit tame. Even though we did the motion capture, two or three individuals bumping into each other does not make a mas- sive horde look like an organic entity itself. I've never had to deal with thousands of people bumping into each other and moving around. It had to feel chaotic, so we tried a few different approaches to achieve that. One was a Massive simulation, but the tricky part is that Massive doesn't handle collisions all that well. So we layered in Ragdoll, did a lot of motion editing, and a lot of keyframe animation for bespoke animation. So It was almost like a mix of all the principles of motion in one shot, and there were several shots like that. Some things we couldn't really plan for; we just knew they'd be tough, like those top-down shots with all the bodies running over each other. But we just tackled them as they came. Nick Epstein: The layers got peeled off and revealed to us. There needs to be a mound of hundreds of Infected, which all need to move around—and then that needs to influence the motion of the infected that run over them. Oh, and by the way, there's explosions going off and they all need to be on fire. It's layer aer layer of difficul- ty. You start getting into it with Alex and with Craig [Mazin], and the reality of the vision crystallizes. This is actually what we're up against. "EvEn Though Some Of ThE work ObviOusly iS FANTASTical by iTS nATUrE, iT's ALl groundEd witHiN sOmE lEvEL oF rEAliTy..." Can you tell us about the process of creating the full CG envi- ronment around Jackson? Nick Epstein: On the environment side, it's important to note that Distillery built Jackson itself. The set was incredibly impressive. It was four fully realized blocks, plus the wall, plus the guard tower, and so on. We inherited their buildings and their mountains behind, which we definitely appreciated. Everything looking out in front of Jackson, that was our creation. The Last of Us always tries to shoot a plate and tries to realize ev- erything practically. So there was an impressive amount of space. But essentially, when you're looking out beyond the gate, you're just met with a massive green screen. We did have some mountains in the distance, and they were somewhat at the correct distance. You could judge atmospheric conditions and so on. We built that environment based on a bunch of tilesets that were shot. Combinations—some in Kananaskis [Alberta], some in Whis- tler [British Columbia]—and they all had to conform to what was es- tablished at the end of Season One when they approached Jackson. We had some pretty good reference, but it was a little bit freeform. So that was a bit of exploration. I think the environment team did a 16 cgw j u ly • a u g u s t • s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 5