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Making of Pacific Rim by ILM

Making of Pacific Rim By ILM

Creating the Kaijus for Pacific Rim

 

When director Guillermo Del Toro conceived the battle between the Kaiju monsters and human-controlled Jaeger robots, he knew the best possible VFX facility to bring this vision to reality would be Industrial Light & Magic, the company that pioneered CG creature-creation. In an unusually close collaboration between director and VFX facility, Pacific Rim gets up-close-and-personal with organic and metallic creatures that are both believable and thrilling.




Guillermo Del Toro is the original fan boy. The director who has been behind an amazing variation of creatively powerful work, from Hellboy to Pan’s Labyrinth, Del Toro is passionately engaged in the worlds of fantasy and sci-fi. So much so that he acknowledged his own obsession by dubbing his latest effort, Pacific Rim, “robot porn.”

Robot porn it is. The terrifying Kaiju — huge monsters from the depth of the ocean, each with its own physiognomy and personality — meet the 250-foot high Jaegers, man-made and man-directed battleship-like robots. The immensity of these main characters (who play alongside a cast of human actors with their human dramas) can’t be over-stated. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), a pioneer in all VFX, brought this all to life.

ILM hard surface modeler David Fogler enumerates some of the stats: The Jaeger ‘Gipsy Danger’ is so large that the Statue of Liberty would only reach its knees. It is 10 times taller than King Kong and its feet are as long as two city buses. She (in the tradition that battleships are referred to as females) takes only two steps to cross a football field.


(L-r) The United States' Gipsy Danger and Australia's Striker Eureka in a scene from the sci-fi action adventure Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures PACIFIC RIM, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: COURTESY OF WARNER BROS. PICTURES. © 2013 WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC. AND LEGENDARY PICTURES FUNDING, LLC.
(L-r) The United States’ Gipsy Danger and Australia’s Striker Eureka.

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By Adriano Sanna, ago

Making of Game Of Thrones VFX by Pixomondo

IT’S ART gives a behind the scenes peek at Game of Thrones Season 3 in an interview with Pixomondo VFX Supervisor Sven Martin.

Still looking for inspiration for our new exciting challenge based on ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’? We’ve the chance to interview Pixomondo VFX Supervisor, Sven Martin, about the VFX made for Game of Thrones Season 3, focusing on the making of the dragons. A perfect way to start a creative day!

IA: Pixomondo is working since the first season on the VFX of Game Of Thrones TV Show. Could you speak about the evolution of the work you’ve done for the series since 2 years?

SM: With the knowledge of the second season we could start right away with facing the new challenges. The dragons where not just bigger copies of the previous season, actually we had to build them from scratch spending a huge amount of time into design and developing the new features. This time the camera was also much closer to the dragons, so we had to go much more into detail. The jaw e.g. had a special mechanic which could hide in ‘normal’ position and slide out and extend when Dragon goes into threatening mode. The complete inner mouth section had to be very precise with tongue, glands (for fire breathing) and dangerous teeth covered in saliva with the camera facing right at it.

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By Adriano Sanna, ago

Wine glass breaking and fluids with Pulldownit

Tutorial by Jordi Alavedra.

I started this project with the aim of testing how Pulldownit behaves along with Cg fluids, and also as a practice in the use of Pulldownit plugin which was pretty new to me. I decided to make a 3 glasses shot for being more genuine than the usual “wineglass breaking” . Besides looking at the web I hardly found any good test of Pulldownit and fluids, so I was a little scary about doing it, but I have to say it was much easier than expected.

PDi counts with several patterns to shatter the models, fist I did was testing them, I started using “local” shatter style, because of the easy of setting the exact impact point, however I discarded it later because the fragments generated looked more like egg-shell than broken glass, using “radial” style in around 200 fragments each glass and I got a high realistic look, I found out that I had only to adjust the pivot of the model to make cracks matching the impact point with the ball so it was perfect. However I needed the neck of the glasses to remain as one single piece so finally I splitted the glass in 2 parts using “Uniform” style before applying radial shattering.

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By Adriano Sanna, ago

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