Makuta produced over 740 digital visual effects for multiple scenes in SS Rajamouli’s epic “RRR” such as the Police Station fight sequence (Ram Charan’s introduction), the Komaram Bheemudo song, intermission fight and explosive climax in the jungle.
T-Junction Master shots with TyFlow Crowd Simulation plus live crowd multiple layers we used to composite this episode.
And it is here! Sit back and enjoy this magnificent #VFXBreakdown of #RRR. Big thanks to our stellar creative and technical teams for their work in bringing S. S. Rajamouli’s vision to life.
Showcasing the incredible feature film visual effects work crafted by our team of artists, creatives, technologists, and support teams – this new reel features work from Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers, Sonic the Hedgehog 2. The Last Duel, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and Nope, to name just a few.
Hollywood has many tricks to make impossible and dangerous stunts into a reality. Movies like “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” “Baby Driver,” and “Elf” used a Texas switch to allow an actor and their stunt double to switch places on screen without having to cut. “Avengers: Endgame” and “Men in Black: International” used wire rigs known as ratchet pulls to make it seem like characters were being hit by a serious blow. Meanwhile, a tuning fork can make characters like Maleficent and Captain Marvel look like they’re flying, and a tarp known as a magic carpet gave characters in “Underworld” superspeed.
With almost 200 VFX shots in just four episodes, working on Netflix’s Cracow Monsters has been an awesome experience. From the creation of the terrifying Hvor monster to the climactic final sequence, this is certainly one you can’t miss! Take a look at this VFX breakdown of the process!
Academy Award® winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro takes you inside the stop-motion magic behind his Pinocchio! Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is on Netflix this December.
The animatronic Giganotosaurus from “Jurassic World: Dominion” (2022) was the largest practical head built for any “Jurassic Park” film. The practical and digital effects teams worked hand in hand to bring the Giga to life. Live-action-dinosaur supervisor John Nolan led a team to create a Giga puppet that looked and moved like a real dinosaur could. The head was placed on a rig that weighed around 9 tons and could move up and down and interact with Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jeff Goldblum, and Laura Dern on set. While only the Giga’s head and neck were created, visual effects supervisor David Vickery and his team at ILM built the CG body to perfectly match the puppeteered movements on set.
The film has more than 25 minutes of visual effects which includes set extensions, chroma-keyed car travelling shots, fog/mist enhance and day to night shot conversions.
Non-photorealistic rendering has opened up an alternative to the ubiquitous “Pixar look.”
When you think of CGI animated films, you likely think of Pixar. The studio practically invented the genre with 1995’s Toy Story — the first CGI animated feature film.
After Toy Story, almost all animation studios wanted to follow in Pixar’s successful footsteps, straight down to their style. Many studios sought out “The Pixar Look”: extremely high quality, physically based, and in some cases almost photorealistic.
It’s an appealing approach that remains popular at the box office — but animated movies started looking kind of homogeneous. And while studios and independent artists tested out more stylized approaches in short films, no studio would commit to a feature-length animated movie that looked so different.
That is, until Sony Pictures/Imageworks took on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Instead of chasing the look everyone was after, the team wanted to create something visually new. They did it with “non-photorealistic rendering.”
And since Spider-Verse, non-photorealism has taken off, with almost every studio set to incorporate it in the next five years. Check out our video to learn more about how non-photorealism works.
Continuing with the wealth of VFX work for this film, we changed our pipeline to primarily Blender for asset work, lighting and rendering, complementing it with our established FX pipeline based around 3ds Max and TyFlow for crowd which we utilised in the Police Station sequence, and rendered using the Cycles For Max port of Blender’s Cycles renderer.
Due to the rock-solid rendering and shading, we were able to create multiple extension duplicates and material variations that we wouldn’t have been able to do with our previous pipeline.
The first time that fire and water come together in conflict needed to be iconic and art directed digitally for the sparks and fire formation, plus the digital water for the spinning shots to ensure a balance between the forces, culminating in a major fist-fight on the balcony which had digital props and environment. This was also digitally extended and rebuilt totally for key stunt shots and sweeping camera moves.
After the first Covid lockdown, filming on this scene resumed with a reduced set which needed to be recreated digitally for the hand-to-hand fight sequence. In addition to this, we created the entire palace grounds layout after LiDAR scanning the space for the opening establisher and build-up shots showcased the exterior gate at night along with fully digital sets and characters to populate the crowd not only at the start, but within the entire fight sequence as well.
For the epic final showdown against the British forces, Makuta not only LiDAR scanned, built and extended then entire digital forest for the studio shoot, exteriors and fully digital wide shots, but animated all of the elemental effects of fire and water fx simulations along with all of the digital props. Digital bows and arrows were created for safety alongside several motorbikes for numerous iconic shots in the film. Culminating in the interior destruction of the armoury building with a massive destruction simulation.