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May 2015

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www.postmagazine.com 19 POST MAY 2015 Avengers: Age of Ultron, making them one of the film's largest VFX vendors. The film challenged them with fur- ther developing The Hulk and Iron Man characters they had worked on in past releases, as well as imposed brand new challenges, including the creation of Ul- tron and helping to carry out the villain's grand plan to destroy a European city by ripping it from the ground. THE HULK: According to ILM VFX su- pervisor Ben Snow, The Hulk appears 50 percent more than in the prior Avengers film, and is much more amped up. "[He's] not really himself," says Snow. "He's an amped-up version, so one of our first tasks was to make him a more extreme and crazed-looking version. Joss likened him to someone strung out on drugs." ILM, says Snow, set the bar high, working to improve upon an already well-received character. "It was like, 'How do be push this even further to make it more believable and a more realistic performance?' We thought a lot about doing that and worked with Mark Ruffalo so he could help us on-set, performing the character for some of these quieter moments. Also, we went in and rebuilt his technology. The design of Hulk was largely the same, albeit angrier and more strung out. We essentially doubled the resolution and rebuilt him from the inside out. We made a full skeleton and skull, which he hadn't had in the past. We rebuilt the muscle system to more cor- rectly drive his surface, rather than be a simulation tool. We took the sculpting we did in the past and rebuilt his muscles, so that once we layered the flesh and skin simulation on top, he would look the same, but you see his muscles move under his skin much more convincingly." While Snow isn't sure of the poly count, Hulk represents the studio's larg- est human asset to date. ILM employs a mixture of off-the-shelf and proprietary tools in its feature workflow. Most of the studio's animation and base rigging is performed using Autodesk Maya. Simu- lations are created in Maya and with the studio's proprietary tools, which provide good soft body dynamics and solid body dynamics, says Snow. "For a lot of our simulation and for flesh and muscle systems, we were using our proprietary solvers. The skin-sliding simulation or muscle-driving simulations, that was implemented mostly with inter- nal stuff." Pixar's RenderMan is used for render- ing creatures, but Chaos Group's V-Ray is used for rendering environments. IRON MAN: The studio was able to use some of the assets from Iron Man's Mark 43 suit, which was introduced at the end of Iron Man 3 but not created by the studio. Still, they were faced with building the Hulk Buster suit and the new Mark 45 — Iron Man's latest creation. "It's a little bit of a different direc- tion," says Snow of the Mark 45 suit. "It's a much more streamlined suit, with rounded forms. It still feels like Iron Man, but it presented some particular chal- lenges because of the rounded stream- line-ness. As soon as he started moving, he got these weird gaps that would open up — more than we'd experienced with the more-traditional design — so it took another layer of work." But even Iron Man's impressive suit pales in comparison to the work ILM put into creating Ultron Prime. ULTRON PRIME: Ultron, says Snow, "was probably the most elaborate hero character that we've created. He was a full robot and had to feel like he was made of rigid material, but we really wanted the essence of the James Spader performance to come through and have a nuance you would get from having an actor like James Spader." ILM received an initial Ultron design from Marvel. The studio then built on top of that, making his body and face even more complicated. "We used a proprietary tool for rigging," recalls Snow. "Basically, it was 10 times as complicated as the rigs we did for The Transformers. It had around 2,000 individual nodes in the rig and 600 in the face alone. This is because we couldn't really get the face to squash and stretch. You didn't want it to deform like a creature would, you wanted to see the plates sliding below one another. It was an extremely-elaborate rig and was a collaboration between the rigger, animator and modeler, adding more cuts and breaking it up. The ultimate goal was According to ILM's VFX supervisor Ben Snow (inset), the studio's 800-plus shots included the Hulk Buster (top) and the more amped-up Hulk (above).

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