In nuce: VFX service provider Rising Sun Pictures (rspvfx for short) has released an almost three-and-a-half-minute VFX breakdown for the third season of the superhero streaming series The Boys. Based on the comic books of the same name by creative minds Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, the series tells the story of the CIA commando “The Boys”, which confronts marauding (anti)superheroes in what will soon be four seasons. Just like the series, the VFX breakdown is not stingy with its explicit – yet humorously exaggerated – depiction of violence.

Click further: In the past, readers of Digital Production have repeatedly marvelled at the eye-catching visual effects that are let off the proverbial leash by VFX service provider rspvfx. See below:

• 8.03.2022: If Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski only knew it: Rising Sun Picturesis filming the Amazon with wet VFXs (for the Disney film Jungle Cruise).
• 28.02.2022: For the War of the Stars series Andor, VFX house Rising Sun Pictures overthrows the empire together with the rebellion.

Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) The Boys (Season 3) VFX Breakdowns

The post The Boys | VFX Breakdown first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: Visual effects service provider Universal Production Partners (UPP) has released an almost three-and-a-half-minute VFX breakdown – filled with eye-catching VFXs from the superhero film Black Adam starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

In toto: The superhero film Black Adam is set in the DC Comics universe and is the 12th feature film from the DC Extended Universe to date. The titular Black Adam is designed as an antihero. In Digital Production 01 : 2023 , Bela Beier spoke to Nikos Kalaitzidis, supervisor at VFX house Digital Domain, about superhero effects, sharp-shooting shootouts – and crispy roasted mercenaries (the article entitled “Black Adam!” can be found on page 62 of the issue). Nikos Kalaitzidis has been working at Digital Domain for almost 30 years now; his portfolio includes feature films such as Titanic, Fast and Furious, Tron: Legacy and X-Men.

Click to continue: Universal Production Partners has been in business since 1994 and has branches in Prague and Budapest. The studio was recently nominated for a BAFTA Award for its work on the anti-war film Nothing New in the West. Their current feature film productions include the Sylvester Stallone film Samaritan, the Matthias Schweighöfer film Army of Thieves and the Disney film Jungle Cruise (also starring The Rock). To the website of Universal Production Partners (UPP).

Black Adam – UPP VFX Breakdown

The post Black Adam | VFX Breakdown first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: As we last did on 6 December 2021, Digital Production is once again reporting on The Foundry’s annual showreel, which treats viewers to some of the most eye-popping visual effects of the year. The Foundry 2022 showreel, which runs for approximately one minute and forty seconds, reunites with screen heroes such as Jane Foster, Thor, Doctor Strange, Neo from The Matrix, Captain Buzz Lightyear from his own Toy Story, the monsters from Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, the dancing and singing heroes from Disney’s Encanto, and Spider-Man in triplicate – the Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland editions.

Click further: If you still haven’t had your fill, click over to last year’s Foundry Showreel from 6 December 2021 , starring the state-certified superheroes Black Widow, Wonder Woman and Venom – and Maya the Bee in her meadow of poppies.

Foundry 2022 | Showreel

The post Foundry 2022 | Showreel first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: Digital Domain has released a new VFX breakdown for the streaming series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (German title: She-Hulk: die Anwältin). All in all, Digital Domain has completed almost 1,000 VFX shots, including 660 shots of the series heroine She-Hulk alone.

In toto: For the series season, VFX supervisor Jan Philip Cramer and his team brought the human-sized actress Tatiana Maslany down to Hulk size. Transferring the actress’s nuanced facial expressions into Hulk dimensions was a particular challenge. For the series, Digital Domain developed in-house tools, including the so-called ShapeWear system, with the help of which garments are adapted to the gigantomaniac proportions of the series’ eponymous heroine. Apart from this, other proprietary Digital Domain tools were used, such as Masquera 2.0 or Charlatan.

Click further: If you want to see more Digital Domain visual effects, we recommend watching the VFX breakdown of the Bollywood blockbuster RRR, which Digital Production reported on 19 September this year. Industrial Light & Magic’s VFX breakdown for the Marvel series Hawkeye, which we reported on 14 June this year , takes us back to superhero fare.

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law | VFX Breakdown | Digital Domain

The post She-Hulk – Attorney at Law | VFX-Breakdown first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

DP: Finally, a Superhero who’s showing bones! How was the transition from “Free Guy” to the DC Universe?
Nikos Kalaitzidis: Black Adam and Free Guy are both heroes! Both universes were creatively demanding and rewarding for myself and our teams. I learned so much working on Free Guy in regards to contributing ideas to the filmmakers, and that helped us come up with more ideas on how to approach the challenges on Black Adam.

DP: How did you get involved in Black Adam, and what was the basic Principle on which you started your process?
Nikos Kalaitzidis: Digital Domain’s visual effects supervisor, Jay Barton, bid on Black Adam beginning in 2020, and we were in discussion with the production-side supervisor, Bill Westenhofer. Then in March 2020, COVID-19 infamously changed everything. Our bid on Black Adam went on hold, like so many other things.

During that time, however; Bill kept working and refining the pre-vis for the film. In the fall, Bill came back to Digital Domain to continue the bidding process, using Unreal Engine rendered pre-vis. Even with COVID-19, show-side production adapted so they were able to start shooting live-action photography in spring 2021. At that point, Jay had begun work on a different show so he was unavailable. Fortunately for me though, I was able to take the baton and continue our bid-to-award for Black Adam at Digital Domain.

DP: How big was the team on this show?
Nikos Kalaitzidis: From March 2021 to August 2022, Digital Domain employed 290 artists and production staff around the globe for Black Adam, primarily from Vancouver, British Columbia, Montreal, Los Angeles, Hyderabad and Beijing. Since we were all working from home, we were also able to employ great artists from different regions including US states like Oregon and Florida, major cities like Toronto and even Germany.

DP: Could you tell us about your pipeline for Black Adam?
Nikos Kalaitzidis: Houdini is like an operating system. Not only did we use SideFx’s Houdini for all of our FX simulations, we also used Solaris for rendering our assets in the “Mine Rescue” sequences. We were able to simulate destruction in large data sets from Houdini, and then pass it to Solaris in an efficient workflow for final renders.

We also used Houdini with our environment team to create façades for buildings laid out in a procedural manner for our Shiruta city build. We rendered all of our hero character assets in V-Ray via Maya, but had a separate look-dev in Mantra for interactive light from the lightning bolts created by our Houdini FX artists. For a specific cloth task to build Black Adam’s cloak asset, we used Marvellous Designer. We also used Unreal for LED content delivered at the head of the schedule during principal photography, and, of course, Nuke for our compositing.

DP: Did you add any tools during for Black Adam?
Nikos Kalaitzidis: It feels like we used every tool available! The last couple years, we have been recording actor performances for data sets to use for machine learning, which we can then use to create digital replacement faces. It’s a proprietary tool developed by Digital Domain that we call “Charlatan.”

For Black Adam, we recorded a specific performance from Dwayne Johnson during our live-action shoot as a safety net, in case we needed to help our Black Adam digi-double face performance look more photo-realistic. As it turned out, we used it for a couple of shots.

DP: When we look at your last movie, Free Guy, Black Adam is far darker – does that make it easier?
Nikos Kalaitzidis: You would think. We had a mixed bag of sequences where we see Black Adam in dark environments, as well as brightly lit. When creating our digi-double assets, we certainly built our Black Adam for any lighting scenario. In the end, there was no cheating – our assets needed to hold up on their own.

DP: If you compare the pipeline to your earlier movies, like Tron: Legacy or Daredevil, has something fundamentally changed about your approach?
Nikos Kalaitzidis: How times have progressed from the sophistication of third-party software, to the fast render times of GPU rendering, to deep-fakes, to Unreal Engine reviews. The call for visual effects is more demanding in regards to creative and the volume of work. Even though it’s faster to get to 85% completion of a shot, it still takes many iterations to get the shot to FINAL. This much hasn’t changed.

DP: Let’s get to the crispy part: How did you roast the mercenary?
Nikos Kalaitzidis: We called these the “Electrocuted Baddy” shots. The director, Jaume Collet-Serra, wanted the shot’s length to be long and for it to be viewed up close, so the audience can get a good chance to see the effect. Immediately, we knew it would be best to execute the shot entirely as CG, instead of taking it over from live-action photography to CG.

The baddy had to shake, burn and lose volume in order for us to get him to a skeleton. From there, Black Adam could snap his skeletal neck. We were fortunate that the actor who played the electrocuted baddy was able to perform on set. As he was getting shocked, all of his body parts shook in a very high-frequency manner. We matched his performance and modelled different shapes, from his regular, normal-sized self to an emaciated version of the actor.

That model was used in animation as a blend shape in Maya. The animation was handed off to our cloth simulation team to shake his clothes, and then passed to FX to burn them. We used Houdini to create the burn, singe, smoke and embers off the CG cloth generated by Black Adam’s lightning-arcs.

When we created electrocuted baddy’s face and body, not only did we need to make his skin photo-real, we also needed to create sub-dermal anatomy, like muscles, capillaries, bones and skull. The director wanted the skin render to be translucent so the audience can see this anatomy, as it would be in the spirit of the comic books. Our look-dev team created skin textures that we called “BBQ layers,” as if we cooked up burnt steak on the BBQ.

The layers of BBQ would be activated and revealed when a lightning arc would collide against it. We created animated textures in Houdini that we passed off to our look-dev team to render in V-Ray. Our compositor had many complex layers to assemble in his Nuke script. One fun fact about the effect is that after working so hard not to cheat the look, we had the MPAA come back to us and request that we hide some of this face melting to pass the PG-13 rating.

DP: You also did the “super-speed” scenes in the beginning – I assume it was more work than just dropping frames?
Nikos Kalaitzidis: Our animation supervisor, Arda Uysal, helped come up with the look by carefully crafting in between key frames. We not only hit the key frames with strong poses, but also animated in between two frames with proper action, like his steps or anticipations. Once rendered with motion blur, these invisible animations suggested a particular action. We designed the motion blur for each frame.

Black Adam’s cloak also helped with the super-speed effect. When he came out of his fast zipping speed, his simulated cloak would carry the inertia of his movement in real time. We would also help the effect by kicking up some dust from the ground courtesy of our FX department. Comp also had a major role in defining the look of this trailing refraction from the motion blur renders. We biased a subtle look, but enhanced the colours of his streaks to make sure the viewer can see the effect

DP: If you’d start again on Black Adam, what would you do differently?
Nikos Kalaitzidis: It’s not all about technology. Working on a project for so long that is so large, I’ve come to the conclusion that it all comes down to the artists, production crew, sups, leads and clients. I was fortunate enough to have worked for, and with such a stellar team on Black Adam. We were able to capture lightning in a bottle on this one. I’m not sure exactly how to recreate that feeling in the future, but I will endeavour to do so. It really is about the people and, you’re only as good as the ones you’re with. Camaraderie transcends technology.

DP: Now that Black Adam sits on the throne of his country (so to speak), what are you up to now?
Nikos Kalaitzidis: I’m on a mission to explore all different universes. Anything (in VFX) is possible.

The post Black Adam! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.