shang chi and the legend of the ten rings had a multitude of vfx houses producing over 2 000
vfx shots 1761 of them made the final cut of a movie that broke the mcu movie cookie cutter
mold along with various box office records rodeo effects scanline trickster rising sun
pictures digital domain wetter digital fin design and effects luma pictures and method
studios all contributed their vfx superpowers to produce yet another marvel blockbuster
rising sun was given the mammoth task of creating the massive tallow environment where a large part
of the movie transpires and a digital jungle that would serve as a backdrop for the latter
parts of the film the tallow environment is approximately 75 square kilometers of jungle
mountains lakes and rice paddies whose look was based on southeast
asia rising sun pitchers started by laying out a physical structure based on research they did on
forested areas of vietnam and east indonesia and then built up a library of trees and flora based
on their research this included many varieties of bamboo the team wanted the environment to
feel completely natural despite being 100 cgi so instead of hand picking where to put a lake or
waterfall purely for aesthetic reasons they decided to use procedural methods they ran
erosion simulators to wear away parts of the landscape where water would naturally
run and tree and plant density were dependent on whether an area was wet or dry and how much sun it
received this method meant that the vegetation appeared where you'd subsequently expect it to
giving the environment a much more natural feel and allowing for happy accidents to occur
much as they do with nature itself once rsp had their environment looking and lit like a jungle
in southeast asia they then had to incorporate live-action plates and a partial set that wasn't
filmed in southeast asia the live-action plates were shot near sydney under the harsh australian
sun so rsp had to adjust these plates to match the deep mix of light and shadow of their junk paying
special attention to the edges of the actors where the bright australian light could push through
trickster was given the tricky and rather awkward job of creating creatures based on chinese
methodology and making them look real whilst still maintaining their magical feel and they found
themselves constantly battling to maintain the illusion there are already some extremely strange
animals on our planet but we accept them to be real because they are so detailed and realistic
trickster had to create a fox with nine tails a horse with scales and a dragon's face and a
creature with no face four wings and six legs and they had to make us believe they were real
funnily enough the dragon horse was the hardest to get right how does a fur covered area on an
animal transition into a scaly area we don't know because no animal has both how do metallic teal
scales react to light compared to hair we don't know because no animal has metallic teal scales
does fat move more underneath fur or underneath scales the problem trickster had was that
nobody knew how these things were supposed to look but everybody could tell how they weren't
we last saw abomination in the 2008 film the incredible hulk and since then he has
continued to transform and now looks a lot like he does in the comic books trickster combined
concept art from marvel the original asset from the 2008 film and references they took
from developments and changes hulk has gone through since then and began to plan how each
part of abomination should look for his face they tried blending the original 2008 asset
with a 3d representation of the face of the actor who played emil blonsky in the 2008 film
they then sculpted a model with marvel's feedback reinforcing proportions and
shapes until everyone was happy and used all of their reference material to add displacement and
bump details alongside textures and at the same time as the creature simulation team
found the best setup for the way the skin slid over the muscles on his bicep and calf muscles
rodeo was planning to travel to macau to shoot background plates and reference plates and get
hdris scans and photogrammetry but then the pandemic hit travel was restricted
and the only viable option left to them was to create a fully cg macau
first rodeo had a question how do you build a replica of a city when you don't have any data
on its topography or geometry they didn't know the answer either so they googled it yes google
maps that's it using google maps openstreetmap data and photogrammetry tools they extracted a
rough geometry of every building in macau and used that data to populate an empty canvas next
they extracted the elevation and topography data and used it to displace the ground plane
of that canvas this gave them an almost perfect starting point for recreating macau luckily the
production team had aerial footage of downtown macau that had been taken for scouting purposes
this along with a catalogue of visual references from the internet gave them
virtual referencing material for creating a fairly accurate representation of macau
since the building for the bamboo scaffold fight scene was going to be a cg in construction
skyscraper the team had to plan whereabouts in the city they were going to place it
once they had its exact location nailed down they could then break down which of the neighbouring
buildings would need to be hero buildings and which could be 2.5 d digital match paintings for
the bamboo scaffold fight scene the team created a rough mock-up of the scene and tagged every shot
to its location on the building this enabled them to determine which window the characters
would emerge from at the start of the scene over how many stories the action took place and which
windows would be damaged the live action plates for the scene were shot on the section of bamboo
scaffolding put up in front of a mirror wall and surrounded by blue screens this was done so that
they could capture the action on the scaffold and the reflection of it in the mirror wall the
action the scaffold and their reflections on the mirror wall could then be rotoscoped because the
blue screen background was also reflected in the mirror wall unfortunately so were the reflections
of the camera crew and their equipment and so these had to be painstakingly painted out
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