Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/977547
6 cgw | e d i t i o n 1 , 2 0 1 8 D E P A R T M E N T beyond to create waterfalls through a huge gorge. It took a tremendous amount of rendering and simulation." Because Wakanda's "golden city" and surrounding environment were so import- ant to set the film's tone, the filmmakers began working with the crew at ILM early. Craig Hammack, who received an Oscar nomination last year for Deepwater Hori- zon, was the visual effects supervisor for this film at ILM. "Hannah [Beachler] had worked with Ryan [Coogler] to get the right Afro-futuris- tic feel, so we had a fair amount of concept art," Hammack says. "The nation was far ahead of the world in technology, but Ryan and Hannah wanted to feel the history." Wakanda is hidden for protection, but it's present in today's world. "The cities have skyscrapers, but they have a connection to Africa and the past," Baumann explains. For example, although a traditional thatched roof wouldn't make sense on a 1,000-foot building, Coogler wanted to see a representation on skyscrapers. "They wanted the feeling of old-world materials, even if built in steel," Hammack says. "We'd develop part of the city, and he'd say, 'Those glass domes don't belong here.' " To base the environment on locations in Africa, Baumann's team captured locations in South Africa, Lesotho, Uganda, and near Zambia's Victoria waterfalls with photog- raphy and scans to give the visual effects studios photogrammetry and textures from those areas. "We expanded the valleys, but it gave us a real-world base and scale," Baumann says. "We'd drop footprints from cities we're accustomed to, like New York City and Chi- cago, into the valleys and see how they felt relative to the mountain size. The hard part was breaking away from the square blocks and building something with a circular, not gridded, base." AFRO-FUTURISTIC CITY A non-Wakandan traveling through or fly- ing over Wakanda would see a poor African nation with small huts and farmers. They wouldn't see how carefully the Wakandans guard these borderlands, or that part of the apparently dense jungle seen from the air is a hologram. Wakandans in high-tech airships flying home from the outside world dive through the hologram to go inside their country, which harbors several different tribes and environments. Inside Wakanda, the people wear tribal cos- tumes. Outside, they blend into whatever milieu they're visiting. The CG city built inside Wakanda by ILM artists in Vancouver and San Francisco occupies an area approximately three miles wide and six miles long, formed with two main centers created with concentric rings. The palace is in one area; a business district occupies the other. "Different tribes influence distinct dis- tricts," Hammack says, "the Merchant Tribe, River Tribe, Mountain Tribe. As we did urban planning and layout, we tailored the archi- tecture and colors to the tribes." ILM's Generalist [digital environments] Supervisor Dan Mayer was on set during filming in Atlanta to do some quick city-blocking. "Fortunately, that gave us a huge head start," Hammack says. "We got direct feedback from Ryan, Geoff, and Hannah for a couple months, so we could hit the ground running in postproduction with a good organization of the city and how it fit into the landscape." Modelers at ILM built highly detailed buildings in Autodesk's Maya – skyscrapers, medium-sized buildings, two-story store- fronts, and so forth – that went into kits that artists working in Autodesk's 3ds Max used to lay out the city and do look-development. They rendered the environments with Chaos Group's V-Ray. "We'd do a scatter plot of the layout to blanket the city," Hammack says. "Once we had that, we could divide the city into sections that we gave to artists to start building streets, adding larger structures and then smaller buildings around those. To make the city feel like it was built in a jungle, we created vast parts with relatively raw landscape and huge swaths of trees. We even put green- ery on the buildings to ground them in that African forest feel." Practical sets in Atlanta provided envi- ronments for the actors to work in – a tribal council room with a bank of windows that, later, would show ILM's CG city outside. A market street with dirt roads and shop fronts that ILM extended. ILM artists also built environments for a dream sequence (see "A Dream," page 10), burned the special herb beds (see "Fire in the Greenhouse," page 9), and built the hero spaceship-like vehicle T'Challa flies in. That ship takes part, along with dragonfly-shaped airships built at Method Studios, in an aerial dogfight ILM created during the third act. The dogfight starts outside the city, flies through the city, across a lake, into a canyon, and through the canyon – a huge digital environment created at ILM. THE SKYSCRAPERS IN WAKANDA HAVE AN AFRO-FUTURISTIC AESTHETIC, A FEELING OF OLD-WORLD MATERIALS.