TECH & TOOLS
UNCOMPLICATING HOW TO BUILD COMPLEX VFX ASSETS
When visual effects artists build computer-generated creatures, characters or environments, they certainly don’t do things by halves. And that means the resulting CG assets tend to be, well, complicated. Here, a range of modelers, texture painters, riggers, lighters, FX and lookdev artists as well as crowd, animation and CG supervisors break down how they made some of their most complex assets in recent times.
By IAN FAILES A HUMAN-LIKE CREATURE MADE UP OF… HUMANLIKE CREATURES
TOP: Scanline VFX’s model of ‘The Long Boy’ in Lisey’s Story. (Image courtesy of Apple TV+) OPPOSITE TOP TO BOTTOM: Crowd simulation and animation pass. (Image courtesy of Apple TV+) The different elements are composited together. (Image courtesy of Apple TV+) Final shot by Scanline VFX. (Image courtesy of 2021 Apple TV+)
The miniseries Lisey’s Story sees the emergence of a gigantic human-like creature realized by Scanline VFX called ‘The Long Boy,’ made up of ‘countless suffering souls.’ Artists began a sculpt, as modeler Kurtis Dawe states, “by splitting it into parts and tackling the individual corpses first. We made five different types of corpses with varying body shapes that were distributed randomly to make up The Long Boy’s body. A big challenge was also finding a clever way to use these individual corpses to construct his different body parts in a way that could function.” The animation department painstakingly posed the low-resolution rigs of individual corpses and elements to match the sculpt. “The Long Boy rig, with low-resolution static corpses, was used by animation in each shot,” says Crowd Department Supervisor Sallu Kazi. “For the final round of animation, the rig was pushed through a Golaem plugin in Maya, which would read the data stored on the rig, recreate the exact poses and layer the motion from the animation library, including facial performances, on top of each individual corpse. The final rig had 590 individual corpses, 486 heads, 480 arms and three legs.”
88 • VFXVOICE.COM SUMMER 2022
PG 88-91 ASSETS.indd 88
5/2/22 2:15 PM
