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www.postmagazine.com 16 POST JULY 2016 Summer B L O C K B U S T E R S also let the animators work on what they like most: layering that beautiful 10 percent onto the captured performanc- es — it's about finesse and nuance." ILM's animation supervisor Hal Hickel oversaw all of the animation work on the film. ILM supervised the work of other VFX vendors such as Hybride and Rodeo FX while the company's offices in San Francisco, Vancouver and Singapore fo- cused on creating the hero characters. "Virtually all of the characters had some very complex hair work, so we developed a new hair pipeline called Haircraft for styling hair," says White. ILM's CG hair has traditionally been either fur or short hair, but orcs have layers of braided hair. "We modeled volumetric braids and added adornments; it was a very sculptur- al process to get the look right." Haircraft was also deployed for the grif- fin, a legendary creature that's half-eagle, half-lion. A wire-controlled rig for the grif- fin was built by special effects so actors could mount a saddle and fly the creature, which was programmed to soar about 20 feet then land. Otherwise, the griffin was animated by ILM. "It was one of the most difficult crea- tures to create," says White. "It required a high-density feather count so we grew a hair for each feather and each wisp off the main stem was another hair. The feathers had to respond to dynamics like wind and character moments when the griffin shook its head, responded to a scratch and ruffled its feathers." The man-sized Frostwolves also used Haircraft for their fur. In one scene, where Durotan stands next to his Frostwolf pet- ting him, a stand-in blue object was used to represent the wolf during a bluescreen motion-capture shoot. "The interaction of Durotan's hands with the CG fur gave us no end of difficulty, but it helped the audi- ence believe in the characters," says White. ILM collaborated with Quebec-based VFX house Hybride on crowd simula- tions. "We sent Hybride the full, high-res- olution orc clans we built, and they built entire crowd systems based on those assets," says White. Westenhofer believes that gamers "will be struck by how the environments they know are there in the movie — but on a massive scale. We strove to build as much on-set as made sense. There was constant discussion of the cost of building versus the cost of set extensions. The Third Floor completed previz for the vast majority of the environments to help us determine what to build and what to do in post." Montreal's Rodeo FX created digital set extensions for the Blackrock Peak and the Chamber of Air. El Ranchito VFX in Barcelona did a lot of big establishing shots for Stormwind and several views of the city, including a fully-digital castle. Both El Ranchito and Hybride contributed to a digital panorama, showing the game's specific territories. Montreal-based Volta contributed to the funeral scene at the movie's conclusion. ILM brought myriad tools to its work on Warcraft, including SideFX's Houdini, Autodesk Maya and 3DS Max, The Foundry's Nuke for all composit- ing, Chaos Group's V-Ray for landscape rendering and Pixar's RenderMan for creature rendering. Warcraft was distributed to theaters in 2D and 3D with Prime Focus World performing the 3D stereo conversion. X-MEN: APOCALYPSE Marvel's X-Men are back on the big screen this summer in Fox's X-Men: Apocalypse, fighting Apocalypse, the first and most powerful mutant from the X-Men universe. As the lead VFX house, MPC Film (www.moving-picture.com) also mar- shaled its forces to complete just under 1,000 shots. The project was based at MPC Film in Montreal, with the compa- ny's London and Bangalore offices also playing key roles in an "all hands on deck" approach to managing "the sheer scale of the show," says CG supervisor James Rustad at MPC Film Montreal. The pro- duction's VFX supervisor John Dykstra managed additional VFX vendors Digital Domain and Rising Sun. (See related side- bars online at postmagazine.com.) According to Rustad, "This was the largest show at MPC Film Montreal since we opened three years ago." Ninety-nine percent of X-Men: Apocalypse was shot in the greater Montreal area, which made it easy for MPC Film's supervisors to visit the set and for the filmmakers to drop by the facility. MPC Film previously worked on X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past, so it had a history with many of the recurring characters. The Third Floor did previs for almost every shot in the VFX-intensive film. "Priority #1," says Rustad, was "how to build and destroy the city of Cairo" for the final battle sequence. No live-action plates of the city were in hand at the time, but MPC Film got "a good guide" of what needed to be done from the previs of the sequence. "Traditionally, we build an extra 50 me- ters around the plate and the rest is matte painting," he explains. "But some aerials needed to be full CG, so we decided to build everything in CG. That meant we could light things consistently and ad- dress creative notes more efficiently than making changes to a matte painting." To construct Cairo as it was in 1983, the setting for the story, MPC Film obtained satellite images of the city as well as older maps and reference photography. "We chose two or three zones and recreated them as accurately as possible," Rustad says. Given the population density of the city, those zones encompassed 500 to a thousand buildings. "We also built four or five backgrounds that we could cut and paste around the area with modifications and rotations. Everything looked very organic and natural — a purely imagined city wouldn't have felt right." It took about eight months to build and destroy Cairo. Modelers used Autodesk Maya and Pixologic's ZBrush to create the library of buildings, which were textured with The Foundry's Mari and Adobe ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS Alice Kingsleigh tumbles through a mirror, returns to Underland and battles Time to save the Mad Hatter in Disney's Alice Through the Looking Glass. Directed by James Bobin and produced by Tim Burton, the new adventures offer myriad opportuni- ties for VFX, and the filmmakers have gone above and beyond to pack the feature with everything you can imagine — and then some. Lead VFX studio Sony Pictures Imageworks did an estimat- ed 1,700 VFX shots, while Double Negative contributed several hundred. Read the full interview with VFX supervisor Jay Redd (pictured) online at postmagazine.com. — CHRISTINE BUNISH