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8 cgw | e d i t i o n 1 , 2 0 1 8 D E P A R T M E N T more eye candy. We have the vibrant neon colors of Busan at night." The chase aer Klaue and his goons in black Toyota 4Runners through the Busan streets begins outside the casino. T'Challa in his Black Panther suit rides atop a Lexus LC 500 driven remotely by Shuri back in Wakanda, and two women race aer Klaue in another car. "We had everything from typical 'A over B' plates, to compositing moving back- grounds around actors on a soundstage, to full-CG roads and intersections," says Brendan Seals, who supervised Luma's team in Melbourne. "The main shot is when T'Challa is on top of the blue Lexus and it turns around a corner. Klaue opens his arm, fires, and the blast rips through the Lexus. It does a full flip through the fish market. We had amazing photography with the Lexus traveling at 50 to 60 mph and a stuntman in a black suit on top. It was great reference to see how light moves across the suit and to get a sense of chaos and action. Once we had the plates, we worked with Marvel to connect all the dots, to sell stunt work captured in camera or replaced digitally." The process involved starting with LIDAR scans of Busan and the roads and buildings on set. The artists mapped the geometry with projections from still photographs of details on the streets and moving panoramas. For the panoramas, a circle of cameras on an "array vehicle" took 360-degree im- ages from two heights as the vehicle moved down the street. Both Luma studios would use the LIDAR scans and the photography – Melbourne for the middle of the chase, Santa Monica for the end. "There were thousands of images," Souls says. "The volume of data was astounding. The guy who acquired it came and worked with us at Luma to help sort through it. Aer that, Marvel would give us selects. We'd sort through the footage using setups in [Foundry's] Nuke that reconfigured the plates so we could point around and look. Once we figured out what part of a street they wanted and what speed, we could correlate it with LIDAR scans and project the footage onto geometry." During the chase, Luma's digital Black Panther bounces electric blue vibranium energy from his suit, runs across build- ings and cars, and spins through the air (see "Power Suit" page 9 and "Cymatic Vibranium Energy," this page). Rather than using projected footage, the crews rebuilt anything that was reflective in CG – wet roads, metal, windows – and added CG ve- hicles. All the hero CG cars are destroyed during the sequence. Luma artists used Maya for animation and rigging; Foundry's Mari, Pixologic's ZBrush, and Maya for modeling; Foundry's Katana for shading and lighting; and Auto- desk's Arnold for rendering. WHOOP STREET Near the chase sequence's finale, Klaue decides to have a little "fun" with Okoye and Nakia, and fires his sonic destructor at their car. When the blast hits, time slows down," SCANLINE CREATED ENVIRONMENTS FILLED WITH WATERFALLS TO EXPAND SETS BUILT ON LOCATION. CY M AT I C V I B R A N I U M E N E R GY Throughout the film, we see waves of vibranium energy – blasting out the sonic disrupter gun and jet thrusters, form- ing holograms, and releasing from Black Panther's suit. To create it, artists at Luma and Method emulated Cymatic patterns created with sound vibrations on light- weight surfaces. Lead FX TD Maciej Benczarski at Meth- od Studios explains. "Ryan Coster, a lead FX TD, implemented the theory," he says. "He applied the mathematical functions to points, which we converted into geometry or curves as needed: particles to drive the energy on the suit, curves to drive shock- waves, or meshes – surfaces – to create patterns in Cymatic shapes when, for ex- ample, glass breaks. He created a formula, not a pattern. We could use parameters to create patterns. "We used VDB [volume] containers to create fully volumetric, three-dimen- sional shapes," he continues. "Then, we could take a cross section to extract curves. When we did, we saw the Cymatic shapes, those beautiful symmetrical forms. We could control the repetitions around the x-axis to make a range of repeated, high-frequency shapes." Benczarski adds, "We shared the OTL for Houdini. The other vendors couldn't see how we created the Cymatic patterns, but they had tools to create their own."