Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/711516
48 cgw j u ly . a u g u s t 2 0 1 6 Beyond the space sequences, there's also a lot of on-the-ground action that re- lied heavily on VFX. "The crew is stranded on a planet," says Chen, "which is par- tially set extensions [and] some full-CG environments. Also, a lot of stuff happens within the bridge or the interiors of the different spaceships. The environments themselves are quite massive. We had to create the environment of a space station – the Yorktown – which is essentially like building an entire city. It's a massive environment – 1.3 trillion polygons! Almost everything in there is a build item – every building, every bench, every lake, and wa- terway. It's a massive undertaking." Dneg runs a Linux pipeline and uses Maya for most of its modeling and animation. The studio relies on The Foundry's Nuke for compositing. For this film, they employed Isotropix Clarisse for lighting. When asked which shots are their favor- ites, Chiang and Chen had different replies. "It was a fantastic opportunity to give a new version of warp speed," says Chiang. "Right from the outset, I presented the idea of folding space and gravitational lensing – that sort of stuff, the science of it. They did a stretch idea in Into Darkness, and they always do that streak, slip/scan type idea, from Star Trek: The Motion Picture all the way through Into Darkness. I really wanted to sell it more as the science of folding space. We end up with a unique shot and look of the way in which the warp bubble works." Chen points to the film's environments. "Not to reveal too much, but there are a couple of worlds that we created that are unique. The Yorktown is supposed to be the pinnacle of Federation civilization. It's a large city out in space that has multiple planes of gravity and is built for docking spaceships and housing different species of Federa- tion civilizations. We spent a considerable amount of time building it and are proud of the final results." – Marc Lous X-Men: Apocalypse Marvel's X-Men are back on the big screen this summer fighting Apocalypse, the first and most powerful mutant from the X-Men universe. As the lead VFX house, MPC Film likewise marshaled its forces in Montreal, London, and Bangalore, India, to complete just under 1,000 shots. Digital Domain and Rising Sun also contributed to the effort, all under the eye of VFX Supervisor John Dykstra. Priority number one, says James Rustad, CG supervisor at MPC, was building and de- stroying the city of Cairo for the final battle sequence. "It was the subject of the first meeting we had on the first day," he adds. No live-action plates of the city were in hand at the time, but the previs (by The Third Floor) gave MPC a good concept of what needed to be done. "Traditionally, we build an extra 50 meters around the plate, and the rest is matte painting," Rustad 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 address 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 obtained satellite images of the city as well as older maps and reference photography. "We chose two or three zones and re-created them as accurately as possible," Rustad says. Given the population density of the city, those zones encompassed 500 to 1,000 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," adds Rustad. It took about eight months to build and destroy Cairo, adding roads, damaged cars, rubble, and debris to the cityscape. Modelers used Autodesk's Maya and Pixologic's ZBrush to create the library of buildings, which were textured with The Foundry's Mari and Adobe's Photoshop. Proprietary layout tools charted the neigh- borhoods. Digital matte paintings, based on location footage shot in Jordan, formed the outskirts of the metropolis. Side Ef- fects' Houdini was deployed to pre-shatter and destroy Cairo. Digital Domain, meanwhile, worked on the opening sequence set in ancient Egypt as well as the Auschwitz environment and some one-off shots for the world destruction. For the Egypt sequence, the studio did a large variety of work – some large-scale environments, slave crowds, and extensive matte painting. Before lighting the large city environment within Maya, custom scripts were needed so the soware could handle the heavy amounts of geometry. X-MEN FEATURES A RANGE OF VFX, FROM COMPUTER-GENERATED ENVIRONMENTS SUCH AS THE ONE IN THE SET ABOVE, TO CHARACTER AUGMENTATION. COURTESY 20TH CENTURY FOX/MARVEL