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06/11/13 Iron Man 3: more suits to play with | fxguide

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Iron Man 3:more

suits to play with

By Ian Failes

May 6, 2013

You can also listen to ourfxpodcaston Iron Man 3

with Digital Domain VFX

The way that visual effects are these days is that we definitely are the

can-do department, - Chris Townsend.

Comments the overall VFX supe on Marvels Iron Man 3, reflecting on the

crucial role his department played in bringing the film to the big screen. Along

with visual effects producer Mark Soper, Townsend co-ordinated 17 studiosacross the globe and more than 2,000 shots for the Shane Black-directed

picture.

fxguide breaks down the major sequences and shots from Iron Man 3, which

this time around featured multiple suits realized by multiple vendors and a

powerful sub-surface skin effect known as Extremis.

***Please note this article contains plot spoilers***

Suits and skin

Although each preceding Iron Manfilm and

The Avengershad of course featured CG

Iron Man suits, this new outing would break

new ground in number, design and sheer

complexity. We still had to be aware of the
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Above: watch a breakdown of Digital Domains VFX for an Iron Patriot

scene in Iron Man 3.

On set, production filmed with portions of practical suits crafted by LegacyEffects, including a half football jersey style painted with a metallic finish and

clamshell pieces of suit, soft-suits and half-helmets, both for the Mk42 and for


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Iron Patriot (a red, white and blue version of War Machine). Even though the

suits often become replaced, notes Townsend, the actual reference you get

as you shoot those live action suits, either as a maquette or a partial suit being

worn, the actual lighting reference is invaluable. It also restricts the body

movements a little bit, which is the right sort of performance.

VFX plates for the suits always made use of HDRIs, LIDAR scans, photo

texture shoots and gray and chrome sphere reference. Invariably wed shoot

a soft-suit with Robert then wed also put tracking markers on his trousers,

adds Townsend. He would also wear lifts in his shoes or be up in a box so

hed be the correct height Iron Man is 65. During shooting we used multiple

witness cams, Canon C300s, and we had two or three running whenever there

was an Iron Man or Extremis character.

Digital Domain was one of several studios that contributed Extremis effects shots.

The Extremis effect was, with the newly designed suits, the films other big

visual effects challenge. It was an internal glowing sub-surface volumetric

effect, explains Townsend. It makes them stronger and helps them re-

generate areas of their bodies. Theres a glitch in the system and the story is

about finding out what that is.

Townsend and Shane Black wanted to ensure that the Extremis look was,

however possible, still grounded in reality. How do make a guy who glows

orange and explodes look real?, Townsend jokes. The answer lay in

referencing actual phenomena such as the aurora borealis, x-rays and how
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things looked photographically when you seen inside the body. We wanted to

steer clear of the medical look and keep a bit of mystery, says Townsend.

We looked at time lapse photography of decaying fruit and vegetables and

played it back to see if this organic process of re-growth and rebuilding. We

looked at time lapse of cars driving through the dessert and there would be

streaks of light flashing through the desert they were very reminiscent and

inspired these energy ribbons that were very organic with pulses of energy.

Previs, planning, shooting

Iron Man 3was filmed mostly in North Carolina, with some scenes captured in

Florida, Los Angeles and China (there is, in fact, a unique Chinese version of

the film with additional characters). DOP John Toll, ASC shot predominantly on

the ARRI Alexa. StereoD completed a stereo post-conversion. The VFX

houses involved included Weta Digital, Digital Domain, Scanline, Trixter,

Framestore, Luma Pictures, Fuel VFX, Cantina Creative, Cinesite, The

Embassy, Lola, Capital T, Prologue and Rise FX.

With so many action sequences and visual effects, the filmmakers turned to

The Third Floor for previs and postvis work. This included the attack on Tony

Starks mansion, the Air Force One rescue, the Rosehill town fight and the

seaport finale. We also provided techvis for several of these, including the

Malibu attack and Tonys suit connect sequences, says previs supervisor

Todd Constantine. We built/used the upper living room level and lower

garage level of Tonys mansion so we could make sure all of our cameras

would fit in such a closed, specific space.


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Previs by The Third Floor.

Marvels Iron Man 2, which we also worked on, only had two suits, adds

previs/postvis supervisor Gerardo Ramirez. In Marvels Iron Man 3, we learn

that Tony has been busy creating more toys for himself. One challenge we

faced was helping define the characteristics of each suit, its features and howthey moved and worked. The fun part was helping determine how the different

traits that each suit has would help push the story forward and in the end help

Tony survive.

Perhaps the most complicated sequence to previs was the final seaport battle.

The scope of the end battle was a challenge, says Rameriz. There were

various stories that needed to be told and we needed to make sure eachaction helped move the story to the next scene. As the edit evolved, the VFX

editors would send me the updated plates and our team would adjust the

shots to the new concept, delivering back revised postvis frames. This

workflow allowed the director and editor to explore various options to tell the

story.

Check out the scene breakdowns below, identifying the challenges faced bythe VFX vendors on the show, and how they solved the issues facing them.
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Suit connect

The suit pieces reach near final form.

The challenge: Make individual Iron Man suit pieces autonomously fly onto

Tony Stark to connect as the Mk42, initially for a Comic-Con trailer playing

some 10 months before the final film opens.

The solution: Trixter took on the the suit connect sequence, designing suit

pieces and the final shots they got the call in May 2012 and completed a

version of the sequence at the end of June.

Beginning with The Third Floors previs, Trixter developed droplet shaped

pieces in lookdev and shot design prior to principal photography. The shots

called for pieces of the suit to be lying around Starks lab, which when

summoned would activate and propel themselves onto his body, finally

transforming into the individual suit sections and undersections as they

connect. We had to use actual elements of say the final glove but shuffle

them around to make it look different, explains Trixter visual effects

supervisor Alessandro Cioffi. Sometimes it was funny because we got

comments that the pieces looked like a kitchen tool or a coffee machine, so

we had to refine the design. It had to look cool but be functional to ourpurpose. The suit was eventually split into 24 parts.
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The iconic final move in the Mk42.

The final suit pieces and final suit itself was made up out of brushed gold, a

red slightly matte finish, dark metals for underneath the suit and for cables and

other parts and a champagne matte non-reflective metal with a fine grain. An

iconic landing shot of the full Mk42 referenced Marvel imagery and used a re-

projection of Downey Jrs face. Trixter relied on a Maya and RenderMan

pipeline, moving into Katana for lighting half-way through production. Effectsadditions were done in 3ds Max, FumeFX and rendered in V-Ray.

For subsequent shots featuring the fully formed suit mirroring for Stark as

Pepper arrives home at their Malibu mansion required a unique approach to

animation for this new domestic setting. We had to make it seem like RDJ

was in the suit even though he wasnt, notes Cioffi. How would he act, how

we would walk? Then he approaches Pepper and puts his hands on hershoulders and does a gentle massage. Then she figures it out and the suit is

standing next to her (so the audience knows its empty) and we had to switch

to a different character that wasnt RDJ. There was a lot of subtle animation

there.
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Part of the glove and boot sequence.

Trixter also contributed to a fight scene later in the film when Stark takes on

some adversaries with just a glove and boot attached to his body. A

somersault shot in that sequence proved particularly challenging. Chris

Townsend was on set and he called me and said hey were running into a little

problem where theres a very dangerous stunt RDJ needs to do and this

cannot be shot on location, recalls Cioffi. So we needed to shoot it in a green

box and bring the action inside the room.

Chris shot HDRs for the room from each corner plus two extras and a LIDAR

scan of the location, continues Cioffi. We matchmoved the green box scene

for the complicated camera move. We reprojected the room onto the model

and enhanced the action, we could move the shot around and re-create the

smoke, feathers and FX coming from the boosters from boot and glove.

The house attack
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The helicopters launch an attack on Starks Malibu mansion.

The challenge: Destroy Tony Starks Malibu mansion which doesnt really

exist inside and out and make it crumble into the sea below.

The solution: Scanline devised the visual effects for the sequence almost

entirely digitally.

Starks house had been established in the previous Iron Man films its

location in Malibu was real and had previously relied on background aerial

plates with a CG house. However, very recently they passed an ordinance that

you couldnt fly helicopters as close as before for the shots we required, says

Townsend. We also realized we needed to see so much more during the day

and we had to re-sculpt the cliff so that we could show the cliff and house

falling directly down to the water. So we had Scanline create the attack as a

photoreal CG sequence.
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Download Video

Watch part of the house attack sequence.

Based on The Third Floors previs, Scanline created an early test started

again even before principal photography had begun. Plates from Iron Manand

Iron Man 2served as reference, and additional photography for textures and

locations were also captured. The shots progressed over the course of year

with continued refinement, including as the time of day of the attack became

near sunset. Chris Townsend had just got a new iPhone 5, recalls Scanline

visual effects supervisor Bryan Grill, and they were shooting some scenes in

Miami with a helicopter and he had shot the helicopter flying below near his

boat just with his phone and we used that as a reference because it showed

the different way the sun was hitting it.

The choppers launch missiles on the house, sending Tony, Pepper and their

visitor Maya Hansen flying in slow motion amongst a wealth of debris, before

Stark summons the Mk42 suit pieces to save his girlfriend. Scanline had been

developing its own Iron Man suit asset, working in Maya and V-Ray, with

animation supervisor Bernd Angerer overseeing the suit pieces and final suit

animation. Graphically it was quite aesthetically pleasing to see a shape that ismore like a flying object than just a chest plate flying across the room, says

Angerer. It just has more aesthetic appeal. And it made more sense from a

functionality point of view that it was built out of these plates that were sliding

into each other they dont compress in a way but they are more mechanical

in terms of folding and unfolding.
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Pepper is saved with the Mk42.

We had a matchmoved rig that matched Robert Downey Jr very precisely,

adds Angerer. In parallel we worked on another rig that consisted of those

individual pieces and there was a system that hooked them up. In the end it

would re-assemble the actual suit but made out of the little pieces. We had a

few scripts that matched the two rigs. We really developed our own new Iron

Man 3 animation style in a way which was based on what had been done

before but has its own spin to it.

For shots inside the mansion, production built the set on hydraulics, split into

two pieces and choreographed action with debris, smoke and bullet hits.

Scanline augmented this with digital destruction and the CG suit, comping inNuke. Although Iron Man takes out one of the choppers, the mansion and

cliffside give way and slide into the ocean below. We used Flowline for the

simulations of the smoke and the water, and we also used Thinking Particles

for the RBD damage, says Grill. Then there are the little bits and pieces that

follow the cliff has its own dust and rocks falling, the water is bubbling and

splashing.
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Iron Man takes on the helicopters.

Now underwater, Stark in a damaged Iron Man suit is weighed down with all the

debris, seen through a murky environment. We used atmospherics and

bubbles and what I call the soup because there was so much debris falling

into the water, says Grill. We really started thickening up the water and

adding multiple layers of articulates. It sometimes did still feel like we were in

an aquarium we were seeing water, we were seeing underwater. but it didnt

feel like we were immersed in water and so we added particulates hitting the

camera lens and things right at the lens to make you feel more engulfed in this

distress.

Heads up
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HUD by Cantina Creative.

The challenge: Almost as recognizable as the suits themselves are the IronMan HUDs how do you draw on previous work and up the ante?

The solution: Cantina Creative delivered upgraded HUDs to match the new

suits seen in the film.

Cantina visual effects supervisor Venti Hristova says there were several new

effects in the Iron Man HUD. For example, the lights on either side of the

external HUD gadget, those two laser lights we built into the actual HUD design

as a motif of where the actual holograms emanate from. We also integrated a

shelf component in the base of the HUD which really utilized the three-

dimensional space the Z-depth a lot more than we ever had in the past.

We took that to the next level and gave the graphics a tactile component. We

built them out to have light interactive features. They glow a certain way they

dont feel like 2D graphics anymore. They feel like glass holograms that couldexist in a photoreal sense.

The HUD for Iron Man was formed through 2D concept artwork and then

brought into the 3D HUD world. We try and bounce off the suit design and

incorporate design motifs from the suit into the HUD, notes creative director

Stephen Lawes. The HUDs in the other films really started off as just graphics

in space and now have a much more holographic feel to them which givesthem more of a sense of realism like they live in the space a little bit better.
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The barrel of monkeys s equence.

POV shots were also given a slightly different feel. Chris Townsend wantedparallax in thee POVs which at first seemed like such a strange thing, admits

Hristova, because how do you see parallax when theres no motion its

locked to the frame. So we had to drift the left and right cameras in such a way

that it would create on the X axis a parallax between the elements to make it

seem as though when a human eye is looking at something and moving slightly

youre going to reveal more.

The graphics were created in After Effects with a team of artists and

production staff including Sean Cushing, Lily Shapiro, Alan Torres, Leon

Nowlin, Matt Eaton, Aaron Eaton, Lukas Weyandt, Jon Ficcadenti, Johnny

Likens and Jayse Hansen. Says Hristova: Weve used as much of the 2D

cheat mechanisms as we can to create a really awesome three-dimensional

texture. Weve also used a lot of plugins the optical flares, chromic

aberration which gives a really nice texture on the periphery of the HUD which

displaces the light and makes it feel even more light interactive and

translucent, and Cinema4D and Maya.
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A HUD for Rhodey as Iron Patriot was also created.

The house attack sequence uses primarily C4D to generate the sexy three-dimensional elements in the radar, adds Hristova. We created the 3D

graphics in C4D and then the barrel of monkeys freefalling sequence used

Maya. In that scene, the entire scene transforms from a 2D After Effects

space to absolute 3D Maya elements on both sides.

For some of the new Iron Man suits appearing in the final battle, Cantina

adapted their suit designs for the graphical display. Shotgun, for example,looked very angular and the colors are very white and gray, so we used that

motif and designed a HUD that was almost TRON-like, says Hristova. Then

another had more of an Asian inspiration and so we created these light

spectrums in the foreground. Nightclub has a round repulsor transmitter so its

HUD design was semi-circular. Hammerheads POV was almost aquatic so we

followed that design sensibility.

Hologram stories
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The challenge: Kilian shows Pepper a brain hologram, and Tony Stark

researches the aftermath of the Chinese Theatre bombing.

The solution: Using deep image, FUEL VFX crafted the holographic

sequences to help immerse the viewer into the story.

The brief for the brain hologram was not to have an instantly recognisable

representation, says FUEL producer Jason Bath. It needed to be a more

ethereal and beautiful interpretation so we looked to stay away from any

traditional depiction of synapses. Instead we researched modern DTI

(diffusion tensor imaging) scans of the human brain, and with the help of data

supplied to us from university researchers, created a base CG model of the

brains fibre pathways. We used these curves to animate light moving withinthe brain. The outer surface of the brain was a separate model with different

shaders, and its visibility and lighting intensity were constantly shifting.
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Deep image was used to render the layers of the brain that Killian and Pepper.

This provided greater control in the balancing of the multiple, semi-

transparent passes, and provide flexibility in adjusting depth of field in comp,

explains Bath, who also says the stereo nature of the production impacted this

approach. As we were re-comping most of our shots in stereo on converted

plates we knew we could not employ any of the usual 2D tricks to get themono shots completed, if that would stitch us up for the stereo delivery. So the

comp leads always had to be thinking ahead in that regard.

After the bombing at the Chinese Theater, Tony Stark investigates the site

using a holographic re-construction of the scene. We had to track the camera

and rotomate the actors in some cases especially when Stark was moving

his hands to control Jarvis, says Bath. We built all of Starks garage in 3Dbecause we needed to be able to have our holograms intersect and collide

with those objects (there is a LOT of CG lighting interaction with the live action

set). The garage model had to be exact because we knew it would all have to

track and stick across all of the various angles. The fact we were re-

comping the shots in stereo meant there was no room for error. The tracking

of the camera and set was all done in 3DE which was helped by having a lidar

of the garage. The rotomation was started with a one point track from 3DE and

finished by hand, frame by frame.
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For the Chinese Theatre scene, adds Bath, it was critical that the real world

geometry of the plate was preserved in the stereo conversion process

because there is a LOT of CG lighting interaction with the live action set and

we needed to our CG hologram elements to intersect and collide with it. We

worked closely with stereo vendor Gener8 to ensure the real-world dimensions

of the set remained legitimate in their converted plates so that our 3D renderswould sit correctly within stereo screen-space.

Searching for the Mandarin
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Luma Pictures worked on several Iron Patriot and Iron Man shots.

The challenge: Show Iron Patriot on the hunt for the Mandarin, the films

apparent villain.

The solution: Luma Pictures created shots of Iron Patriot flying over

Pakistan, and also worked on a sequence where he is captured and subjected

to the Extremis effect (Luma also completed a number of Iron Man battered

suit shots for the film).

The flying Iron Patriot shots made use of FumeFX for clouds with some

Houdini volumes, and two and a half D matte paintings for the ground planes.

Luma incorporated suit assets into their Arnold rendering pipeline.
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The Extremis power used agains t Iron Patriot.

For the Extremis shots, the studio created the molten lava look on the metal

suit as an asset level effect rather than per-shot. This meant that once we

lookdevd the asset and got things working we were able to propagate that into

the shots, says Luma visual effects supervisor Vince Cirelli, rather than the

other way around, which involves getting the asset in there and slapping overlayers.

The molten lava was texturally procedural and it was also inside the shader in

the way it animated the different values of the metals, adds Cirelli. So when

the metal heats up, its not just a matter of it getting red, the surface properties

actually change on it. There are certain areas that flake and do not look like

they are reflective they almost look dark and are silhouetted against thehotter portions of the suit.

Extremis explained
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A Framestore Extremis s hot.

The challenge: Define the look of Extremis as it reaches the skull.

The solution: Framestore had a number of Extremis shots for characters

including Savin, Brandt and Pepper, that featured the effect around the skull, a

look that was then used as the basis for other vendors on the show.

To create the skull look, Framestore, under visual effects supervisor Mark

Bakowski, conceptualized a volume-driven approach, something that camefrom deep within the body and not just on the surface. For this they modelled

the skeleton and muscles including blood vessels and capillaries. Close

matchmoving was also essential. The main challenge was to find together the

look of the Extremis, says CG Supervisor Alexis Wajsbrot, mixing the

anatomically correct component, with the more magical lava one. How much

do we see the bones / veins / muscles / teeth?

The flow of Extremis was split in two a deep flow that was more blurry and a

surface flow that was brighter and sharper and flowing onto the veins very

close to the surface. We had a few iterations going back to modelling adding

arteries, capillaries, adds Wajsbrot, finding the right distance between the

arteries and the skin and between the skin and the bones for everything to be

lit correctly. We also went back a few times to the rigging department in order

to have the right deformation of the anatomy for the 3 characters we were in

charge of. The model was very heavy we had to save every files as Maya Ascii

as our model was over the Maya binary 2g limitation file size.
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Close-up on Extremis effect.

Lighting delivered four key passes to comp, using Houdini for the flow of

particles going through the arteries, veins and capillaries. We were exporting

these as texture / point clouds (one point cloud per anatomy member, so we

were able to render them separately) and a baked mesh of the arteries with

per vertex attributes baked in, says Wajsbrot.

The Extremis is as well as being a flow of hot energy going through the

arteries beneath the skin revealing the anatomy of the character and so is also

generating some steam, adds Wajsbrot. We were doing some Maya fluid

simulation out of the texture map created by our Houdini FX TD to generate

the steam. The big challenge was also to create a setup to be able to deliver

150 shots in a very tight schedule. Everything we were showing to the client,

we needed to make sure that we could automatise it and do mass production.

For some regeneration shots, where the character Brandt is walking through

the fire, Maya FX TDs were also using the Houdini flow texture to create some

RGB 2D fluid simulation on the skin. This was then used to reveal different

status of the skin, such as wounded or burnt or blistering and charred skin (the

charred sin was done as an nCloth setup).

The dependency was the key here, notes Wajsbrot. We started with an

animation bake Houdini FX TDs were creating a flow of particles for this

bake Maya FX TDs were generating steam out of the flow, and also

generating 2D fluid sims out of this same texture (that was treated in Nuke to
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make it wider with a bit of noise to make the emission more interesting). Other

FX TDs were using this 2D fluid map to launch a nCloth simulation to make the

skin fall and obviously lighters and comp were using this 2D fluid map to

reveal the different stages of the regeneration.

The power of Extremis

Savin uses his Extremis power to bring down a water tower.

The challenge: Highlight the power of Extremis by bringing down a water

tower, and also have Kilian breathe f ire.

The solution: Method Studios delivered a range of shots that showcased the

effect of Extremis on individuals bodies, and then delivered fluid sims for a

water tower destruction.

When Stark finds himself in rural Tennessee investigating the cause of several

mysterious bombings (actually glitches caused by Extremis), he encounters

one of Killians agents, Savin. Savin taunts Stark, using his power to heat up

the leg of a water tower that turns to molten metal and crashes down.

Method realized the Extremis effect seen inside Savins body based on
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vascular and bone system models provided by Framestore. We modeled

Savin ourselves and bound that to the rig, explains Method visual effects

supervisor Matt Dessero. We would build blend-shapes for certain

performances. We then built the skin maps in UV space and controlled them in

comp and articulated them nicely around patches on the face. Wed pull a

luminance map on the skin so that we could knock it out even more to make it

look more organic looking. It was all about a deep glow, rather than a surface

effect, so it needed to be held out by the muscles, bones and veins.

Download Video

Watch a breakdown of Methods work.

We had to be able to track very closely, he adds. Our matchmoves and

roto-mation had to be spot on. Thats where our blend shapes came in. The

matchmovers would get that back and toggle between blend shape A, B, C

and D usually we had three or four shapes per performance. That gave us

nice tight locks to the body. In the inside internal veins, the matchmovers are

working with our simple bone system and the extra vascular tied into that.

For the water tower collapse, Houdini sims were used for the molten metal

look. A dump tank of water was filmed on set for the crashing towers contents,

with Method adding secondary splashes and spray. The shot cuts to a large

water wave coming right towards camera a fully CG shot. We modeled the

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tower in Maya, textured in MARI and ran some of the animation in Maya and

sims in Houdini, says Dessero. Then we went into water sims with geo

exported from Maya through Alembic into Houdini.

The water tower collapses .

Method was also responsible for shots of Kilian demonstrating his own

Extremis powers to have the captured Rhodes exit the Iron Patriot suit. We

received the base Iron Patriot suit from Digital Domain, notes Dessero. We

had to score the suit to have it open. We added extra textural detail. There

were 100s of pieces for the animator to control. We started with the exo-

skeleton of the suit and hit timing marks so we we would say I want the head

to open by say this frame and then the shoulders open a certain frame. Thegoal was to make the suit feel very heavy.

When Rhodes jumps out, Kilian literally breathes an Extremis kind of fire from

his mouth. Explains Dessero: You see the energy coming up from the center

of his chest, up to his neck and theres the incandescent glow out of his mouth.

They didnt want it to feel too fiery it had to be volume rays more and mixed

with fire. Fire hits the wall done in Houdini and we put some collisiongeometry in there with a lot of embers and heat distortion.
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Hear more from Digital

Domain visual effects

supervisor Erik Nash in

our Iron Man 3

fxpodcast

Attack on Air Force One

Iron Man must rescue falling passengers from a stricken Air Force One.

The challenge: Have Iron Man save 13 free-falling passengers from Air

Force One over Miami, using plates of real skydivers filmed elsewhere.

The solution: Digital Domain rendered a digital plane, CG Iron Man and digital

backgrounds for the dynamic sequence, while also incorporating the

skydivers.

In the sequence, Killians men have stolen

the Iron Patriot suit and use it to board Air

Force One, abduct the President and

subsequently destroy the aircraft. When

several passengers fall from the plane, Iron

Man rounds them up mid-fall and delivers

them safely into the water below.

Digital Domain visual effects supervisor Erik Nash, himself a veteran of over

1300 skydive jumps, oversaw the freefall sequence. It made for an awful lot

of work for us to establish continuity from shot to shot, changing the

environment, changing the skies, says Nash, but it imbued the sequence with

a visceral reality in terms of the camera work and the relative motion between

the camera and the people.
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- Above: watch a breakdown of DDs VFX for the Air Force One sequence.

For Air Force One, DD looked to scores of reference imagery and video and

soon learned it is probably one of the cleanest aircraft around, says Nash. I

think when its not flying theyre washing and polishing it, which made our job of

making it look realistic all the harder because all of the typical grunge andgrime that you add to make a CG plane look real you really cant do on Air

Force One because the real one is so clean. So we made it look a little dirtier

than the real thing.

The Red Bull freefall team carried out the jumps wearing civilian and military

clothes with chutes underneath. A skydiver also wore an Iron Man soft suit to

replicate the heroes look and colors, although this would of course bereplaced with a CG version of the suit, along with a large environment build and

sky and sun positing matching. A cameraman captured the footage with helmet

mounted RED EPIC, using the same Leica lenses that main unit had mostly

filmed with on the Alexa.


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The descent continues.

It was easily the biggest rotoscoping job Ive been involved with, comments

Nash. Compounding that was not just the amount of edge work but also the

complexity of the edge work we had to deal with. We had to work with flapping

fabric and loose hair. There were three or four women in the group of 13 all

with relatively long hair, and at 120 miles an hour the hair is moving around

rather frenetically.

Every performer involved in the freefall sequence was full body scanned, head

scanned and wardrobe scanned and photographed with the help of 4DMax for

the purpose of creating digi-doubles. The scanning company also completed

LIDAR, cyber scanning and digital modeling for the entire film.

The Iron Man suit relied on Digital Domains pipeline set up for Real Steel

Maya and V-Ray. DD had also developed early design and modeling work on

the suit and others featured in the finale, with the studios renders shared with

the other vendors to match. As much as I wanted to get back out there and

jump again, we dont really have a HDR apparatus for freefall, says Nash. We

were also changing the environment almost on every shot in the sequence so

what we wound up doing was creating an HDR that served the whole

sequence that had our sky and clouds and Miami landscape built into it.
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Iron Man saves the passengers.

The water landing made use of a dual wire hanging rig for each of the

performers. The wires are crossing other performers and the water and the

background, notes Nash. That was shot in the ship channel and had to look

like Miami. The water in the ship channel is not blue by any stretch of the

imagination it was more a sickening shade of brown so we had to Miami-fi it

make it look like that tropical blue water that is so typical in south Florida.

Arrival at the seaport

Cinesite composited several sea port shots.

The challenge: Stark and Rhodes initial arrival at the sea port for their

confrontation with Killian and his mercenaries relied on a mix of greenscreen
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A further Cines ite comp.

and practical sets.

The solution: Cinesite carried out composting for the sequence, as well as

dozens of other shots for the film.

We did the front end for Tony and

Rhodes arrival and the shoot-out,

says Cinesite visual effects

supervisor Simon Stanley-Clamp.

It was mostly greenscreen comps

and nesting greenscreens back

into digital environments and then

placing digi-environments back intogreenscreens. The environments

were models and textures from Weta that flashed through our pipeline which

worked really well. Layouts were sent for quick approval, and we worked in

additional smoke, dust, light passes.

Cinesite also completed several traveling car composites and an aerial view of

Starks factory a re-purposed helicopter plate of a university campus thatrelied on digital matte painting and SpeedTree foliage work. And the studio

delivered a key shot in which a character was killed off earlier than planned,

and so had to be replaced with another character by painting her out, patching

backgrounds back in and inserting the new actor from greenscreen.

So many suits
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Some of the new s uits brought to life by Weta Digital.

The challenge: Although 36 suits feature in the final battle, Weta were initially

asked to do 10 hero suits and 12 background suits, but that grew to 12 hero

and 24 background suits. When the extra non-distinct (ND) suits also proved

appealing, they too had to withstand full-screen scrutiny.

The solution: Weta Digital crafted 10 the hero suits to high detail, based on

early Digital Domain builds, and then built the ND suits out of parts of the

heroes. That meant no compromise in terms of CG quality whether a suit

would be seen in foreground or background action.

Over 500 shots, Weta Digital handled most of the epic final sea port battle in

which Stark and Rhodes engage Killian and his mercenaries with a little help

from 32 newly designed Iron Man suits. The result is a fiery aerial encounter

around massive gantry cranes, as well as a stand-off between Stark and Kilian,

now demonstrating his full exposure to Extremis.
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Previs by The Third Floor.

We used parentage markers on pieces so they knew which textures to pull,

explains Weta Digital visual effects supervisor Guy Williams. The hero

textures got used on the individual suits and the only texture work we had to do

for the ND suits were distinct markings. So Hot Rod had flames on his legs, for

example. But for the most part it was changing a couple of shader parameters

or group assignments what was gold on one suit was car paint on another.

The studio had, of course, worked on an Iron Man suit for The Avengers,

writing a new car paint shader. For Iron Man 3 this was completely written to

further enhance the material absorption properties. And since the sea port

battle was a nighttime sequence, Weta Digital steered away from IBLs andinstead relied mostly on direct area lights. Close to camera we would ray

trace the suits not a full-blown ray trace but we would do a trick where we

would ray trace into the indirect cache which allowed us to get something that

looked just as good as a ray trace but was a lot faster, says Williams.

Suit transformations
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Heartbreaker.

The challenge: While battling the mercenaries, Stark is able to move around

the cranes or escape perilous falls by summoning the flying Iron Man suits and

literally jumping into the back (and front) of them as they connect around him.

The solution: By developing a new Guide Rig Puppet, Weta Digital allowed

animators to bypass the usual puppet referencing process and also create a

flexible approach to cutting up the suits for the connects and even for shots

of the suits being torn apart.

Usually, an animator working with a reference-based pipeline is working with a

puppet that cannot be modified the puppet is locked. This means you can

never do custom hacks to your puppet because it would essentially break the

puppet and the pipeline, explains Weta Digital animation supervisor Aaron

Gilman. Its a way of protecting the flow of information that goes through the

pipe.

But for the suit connects essentially transforming metal pieces the suit

panels and the internal under armor that drove the outside panels needed to

be shifted around, opened and closed, and even ripped off. With a normal

referencing system, an animator would not be able to take a metal panel and

do the required custom cutting of the geo, move the geo and push that down
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the pipeline.

Tony Stark about to enter one of the transforming Iron Man suits.

Normally what would have happened, adds Gilman, is that we would have

had the animator not even start with the puppet for the transformation. We

would have them start with the hero model which is just a static piece of

geometry that sits at the global origin of the scene. On that hero model they

would have used their knowledge of modeling and taken whatever modeling

tools theyre comfortable with and would have started manually cutting updifferent pieces of the geometry. The animator would have taken the time to

cut up all of those panels and would have been doing this on a static model

there would have been no animation at this point no body blocking or

performance within the context of their actual shot. Then they would have taken

a bunch of locators and patched them to each one of those cut pieces, then

animated them and created a lookdev for what the transformation might look

like. Then that would have shown to me and the VFX supe, but we would never

have shown it to the client not in this form to Marvel, because they are

interested in what the performance is going to be in the context of a shot, not

what a model is doing in the global origin at a static t-pose.

Thats the usual process. It can take a long time. And a lot of work can be

done between rigging, modeling and animation before anything is even shown

to the client. Then, if the client has any critiques, the whole process must

essentially be repeated. Weta Digitals new approach, envisaged for the suit

connect scenes, was to give the animator creative control over the puppet.
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And thats what Weta Digital developed, something they called the Guide Rig

Puppet. Its essentially a puppet that exists outside of that reference system

and it gives the animator complete control over all of the hi-res geometry of the

actual Iron Man model, says Gilman. Then we built a bunch of proprietary

tools that give the animator huge amounts of freedom, efficiency and the ability

to stay creative while designing a transformation on a puppet that is actually

moving within their shot. We can cut up these panels on an Iron Man suit while

the Iron Man is performing the story of that shot.

One of the many suits created by Weta Digital for the finale.

Other tools allowed the animators to generate custom controls on panels and

keep track of parent/children hierarchies. That gave us the freedom to design

the transformations within the context of a shot, get the blocking performance

and even final anim in front of Marvel for a buy-off, says Gilman. Once they

approved that wed go through the process of officializing everything we had

done, which we would have done in this ultimate universe at the very beginning

before we showed anything to Marvel. Now that we have an animation approval

we can then give our guide rig to models who will see all the cuts, officialize

these, hand to creatures who would then finalize the official hi-res puppet.

And the same Guide Rig Puppet was used also for shots of the suits having

their arms, heads or legs ripped off by mercenaries, as well as shots for the

suit that could disassemble its limbs and use them as flying weapons before

they re-attach. A third use for the rig lay in the addition of damage over a series

of shots to a suit. In the same way that we can cut up metal panels, we can cut


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up metal panels to damage them and fling them off the body of the character,

says Gilman. The cool part was that the tools we built allowed the animator to

flag down the pipeline which panels they wanted to go downstream and which

panels they wanted to stay upstream. So if you were working on a shot and you

know that your character has been damaged four times when youre doing a

shot thats had four shots worth of damage, you need to very quickly load that

damage from those shots to your shot, so that when you do further cuts you

want to make sure youre cutting on top of the damage thats already been

done.

Digi-vironment building the sea port

Stark jumps into Iron Man suits during the sea port sequence.

The challenge: With aerial fly-throughs, crane destruction and complex

camera moves, it was determined early on that a fully digital model of the sea

port would be needed.

The solution: Weta Digital modeled the entire area with cranes, containers,

yard dressings but spent significant time ensuring the environment would

render efficiently. Deep compositing helped, too.
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Parts of the sequence were filmed with partial sets and with actors against

greenscreen. Weta Digital looked at satellite reference to help with the layout

of their digital asset before launching into the large-scale build. Once we got

the whole yard built, recounts Williams, we then went through a long process

of trying to make sure it would render efficiently because we had 500 shots.

We cached all the lighting and shadows into brick maps so that the yard render

delivered more efficiently. We broke the yard up into a lot of passes and the

renderer had scripts that did all that for you.

The detail didnt suffer however, he adds. We didnt make it efficient just by

throwing away polygons. We made it efficient by being smart about how we

proceeded with it. Ultimately, one of the main gantry cranes in the sequence

was made of 46,000 objects, about 3.2 million polys, while even a more

background crane constituted 692 objects and 46,000 polys. These were lit

with around 215 area lights.

The sea port environment.

Weta Digitals leading approach to lighting and deep compositing were also

crucial in realizing the sea port environments and the surrounding action. I

cant even fathom doing a project like this without deep compositing because

what it allows you to do is bank renders early, says Williams. Everything took

an incredibly long time to render but the second the yard was ready we

rendered the yard before the animation was even done. So as long as we

knew the camera wasnt going to change we could start doing the renders. And

since we didnt have to worry about hold-outs, even the fluid sims didnt have


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to be re-done if we wanted to change the frame.

Williams notes that atmospherics also helped sell the scenes, with Weta

Digital often replicating what had been achieved on set. If you look at the live

action plates, the DP would go around and put lights in the sea port shining

back towards the camera, and then smoke up the set so you couldnt see thestand or the cherry picker you would only see a bright lens flare shining at

you through the smoke. We worked really hard to replicate that in

compositing.

And our lighters would put lights down in positions so that the cranes felt very

positionally lit, which really helped with the scale of the cranes, adds Williams.

Then theyd pass off chan files basically positional locators for Nuke andthen we could attach lens flares to those files and then do volume renders for

shadows and light to get atmospherics built into the shots.

Background animation

The challenge: Detailing significant background action to depict suit versusmercenary battles as the sea port sequence plays out.

The solution: Weta Digital ensured that this additional action did not

overshadow the foreground characters something that proved more difficult

than first thought.

Initially I thought it would be easy to create a library of behaviors, flying and

shooting and banking with our mocap performances and plug all that into the

background of all the shots, notes Gilman. But very quickly we realized that

wasnt going to work for one fundamental reason. Animators are educated

and trained to generally have their animation performances be as vivid and

dynamic as possible, but plugged into the background, their natural thinking

process is to make the animation read as physically and dynamically as

possible. The problem is this is a background performance we dont want itto read like that. It detracts from what youre meant to see in the shot.


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Download Video

See some of the final seaport shots in the films trailer.

An example was the negative space around foreground characters in a scene.

At first, animators filled this space almost equally with flying suits and tended

to follow the rule of thirds notion of having the most interesting action at the

intersecting points. Ultimately, that approach was adapted to reflect more of a

war footage feel, much more random and organic. There was also a tendencyto put suits in the background of every shot, says Gilman, but then you would

have that repeating from shot to shot and it would create this monotone

rhythm. So because its CG we could artistically create these shots, we could

choose to have some suits in the shots and not others, then there would be a

proper rhythm forming.

In one go the crane comes down

The challenge: During the climax, an explosion triggers one of the main

gantry cranes to collapse as seen over multiple shots in the sequence.

The solution: Rather than simulate the collapse over the multiple shots with

individual sims, Weta Digital elected to do a single 500 frame animation with atwo pass simulation that could then be broken up into the desired camera

coverage.

00:00 |00:00
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Animator Julia Chung designed the collapse. While we were blocking out

these shots we simulated and animated one single shot of the crane falling all

the way to the ground and then we would position the timing of that in the

individual shots, explains Williams. It was akin to shooting live action we

dropped the crane only one time but the 5-10 shots that you see the various

parts of the crane destruction in all those shots were pulled from the master

destruction file. That allowed us to share the same rigid body simulation, the

same fluid dust simulation, the same cable sims it meant we could put the

sum of all the effort into one shot and break it up into the individual shots.

The first pass took the largest parts of the crane segmented into blocks that

ran as a constrained rigid sim. The resulting motion was then used to drive a

detailed rigid constraint sim to account for all of the geo on the crane. We set

up with about 5,000 to 10,000 pieces of rigid geometry held together with

constraints and springs, says Williams. So as the cranes coming down all

the railings are swaying and the catwalks are bouncing. Anything that came into

contact flattened and broke its constraints and then those pieces were post-

nominated back into a cloth solve and were all deforming as slightly pliable

metal. That system was insanely huge and took about a day to run the entire

sim. Then we had to iterate.

Extreme mercenaries

The challenge: Weta Digital was charged with completing Extremis effects

for the mercenaries, including shots of limb re-growth, and for Pepper who has

been subjected to Extremis injections.

The solution: The studio relied on several techniques to highlight the glowing

Extremis look. Instead of trying to do it all in comp by tracking on patches and

trying to make it look kind of right, says Williams, we got a ray trace through

the skin using refraction through the skin surface and then the ray trace did a

ray march and ray marched all the way through the skin, stopping at every point

and ray marched to a local light so you could see it moving around and

blocking the light from the muscles to the tendons and bones.


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The cool thing was, he adds, that being a proper ray trace, the deeper

something got the more it absorbed the light and it became blurry so you got

this great sense of depth and absorption. We did do some helper passes for

the bones and the veins the reality is that if it was not within a centimeter of

the surface then it would be so blurred and occluded it would just be a value

change as opposed to a detail. So we added more detail by putting more

veins closer to the surface, and we made the bones a little more blurry than the

veins.

Extremis to the extreme

The challenge: A slight change to the films ending involving Stark and Killianand Guy Pearces freshly grown beard meant a whole new set of challenges

for realizing the finale.

The solution: Weta Digital wentall digital. The studio had already replaced

Killian from the waist up to his neck with a digital double (since the character

had taken his shirt off to reveal tattoos underneath) that featured a tissue solve

for the muscles, fascia and skin. When the re-shoot occurred, Pearces beardmeant that it was essentially easier to also complete a digital head, requring a

full FACS session for relevant facial poses.

In his final confrontation with Stark, Killian has what Williams describes as a

lava God appearance. He has just been in a large explosion and his body is

seen re-growing. Large portions of his body were covered in this black husk

and it was almost like a large scab that would crack and peel apart like lava

separating, and at times large sections of the husk would fall away revealing

bright sections underneath. Weta Digital crafted a system to birth husks onto

the skin, and combined that with a fluid sim for the smoke and heat and extra

particles for embers being emitted.

The Iron Man legacy

On Iron Man 3, Chris Townsend and the visual effects teams were able to


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continue to innovate both technically and artistically by drawing on the already

rich effects work that is now part of the Marvel universe. But they also manged

to introduce a new approach to Iron Man performance and animation. In this

film we have various Iron Man characters walking around just doing normal

things, says Townsend, theyre not always fighting helicopters or Extremis

characters. Sometimes theyre just sitting on a couch or walking across a

room. We worked hard with the companies to get those subtle performances,

say when hes just giving Pepper a massage. Its not always the whizz bang

moments.

All images copyright (c) 2013 M arvel Studios. All rights reserved.

Thanks so much for reading our article.

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2 Responses to Iron Man 3: more suits to play with

1. Excelente informacin.

Es tan increble la realizacin de los efectos visuales de iron man 3 como espectacular fue el resultado,

realmente admirable.

Posted by yvan Mostacero Alvarez on May 8, 2013 at 11:20 pm

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2. Fantastic article! Love it. Great work Ian & the FX Guide team putting all this together.

Posted by Matt Wallinon May 13, 2013 at 8:02 am

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