Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/691968
22 cgw m ay . j u n e 2 0 1 6 What other VFX vendors did you work with? We tried to break the film up by sequences. ILM was the lead house and started early, building the different digital doubles, the Iron Man armor, War Machine armor, Black Panther, Spider-Man, and then they would share their digital assets with the other companies. Method worked on the final battle between Captain America and Iron Man, and Rise handled the Lagos sequences at the beginning, where Captain and his team are fighting together aer training together. Trixter did the fight with Black Panther, and Dneg worked on the fight with Hawkeye and Vision, when Hawkeye shows up to break Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff) out of the Avengers' com- pound. Those are the major battles, and then we have an additional nine vendors working on the rest of the shots. What tools did you use on the film? I think we pretty much used everything. ILM has a lot of proprietary tools in their pipeline, but because we're sharing assets, they had to create the characters in such a way that the other vendors could pick up the intent of the rendering and the animation, so you can share the geometry, you can share the textures. Each vendor used its own animation systems, and the majority of those were built on top of Maya, which allows you to extend it quite a bit and add your own toolsets to it. So, if we shared the skeleton between the different effects houses, they could take that skeleton and hook up their own animation system on top of that and then skin the character. It just became tricky with someone like Iron Man. Imagine a suit of armor that wouldn't allow you to move, but through the magic of CG, you can force it to move in the way you need it to move. We based our color pipeline on Nuke. We would create a sam- ple Nuke file and then send it out to the effects houses and say, 'This is how we're applying our color, and this is the color space we like to use.' It came down largely to Maya and Nuke. V-Ray was used quite a bit between the bigger vendors – Method and ILM, in addition to their in-house shaders. What was the most challenging scene to pull off? Definitely the scope of the fight at the airport was the biggest chal- lenge to overcome because it was balancing the different characters together. I was working out the fight with the previs department and just keeping track of all the characters. We had a table laid out in our offices with all these little toys, they're called hero clicks, and they're basically little plastic sculptures of the heroes – not unlike war movies where they have the map on the table all laid out with these statues to show the armies. We did the same thing with the heroes in the splash panel, so Black Widow and Ant-Man are fighting each other over here and these characters are fighting each other over there, and as the fight rages, there is a logic to where everybody is, and there's a sense of design. Part of the movie is about heroes causing too much damage, so one of the rules going into planning the fight at the airport was that there shouldn't just be full-on destruction of the air- port. A lot of time when you're planning a sequence, you fall into a trap where it's, 'Hey, it would be easy to blow up this fuel tank over here.' We said, 'No, let's not do that, let's have the heroes fight each other using their powers without destroying every- thing because it's something new.' The Russos always described it as a fight that breaks out, like at a family dinner. They're a family, and they care about each other, but the fight gets a little out of hand. That's what was great. The fight goes on for just under 20 minutes, and it ends on a down note when War Machine gets injured. We pay off the second act with this fight that's fun and a little bit serious. It prepares you for the final battle when we do get serious with Captain America, Iron Man, and Winter Soldier, and the movie then takes this tonal shi from being a fun superhero movie to, Wow, this is something that's very serious, and it is going to have ramifications beyond this film. ■ Linda Romanello (lromanello@postmagazine.com) is the managing editor of Post, CGW's sister publication. WHEN SUPERHEROES FACE OFF, SUPER EFFECTS ARE NEEDED. ARTISTS MAINLY USED MAYA AND NUKE. C M Y CM MY CY CMY K