Event Summary The Making of “Real Steel”
Approximately 50 students and artists filled the main training room at Escape Studios’ newly opened facility in Santa Monica to watch Digital Domain present a behind the scenes look at the making of the VFX for Real Steel.
The Escape Studios Team
To lead off the event, Digital Domain’s Digital Environments Supervisor, Geoffrey Baumann, gave an in depth look at the photography and thorough documentation done on set. Environment panoramas, HDRs, and camera andlight locations were all captured on location, and terabytes of reference materials were sent back to the DD team.
Next, Animation Supervisor, Erik Gamache, walked through the challenges of creating believable robot animations and fight sequences. Erik described how they were able to take the mocap provided by actors on stilts, which lacked the correct proportions and the necessary weight and gravity of 9’ tall robots, and modify the animations to achieve the final results.
Erik Gamache, Animation Supervisor
Digital Lighting Lead, Blake Sweeney presented how sophisticated lighting setups were created and rendered in V-Ray; and he described how they were able to use the VRayBlendMtl and a series of masks to reveal layers of damage as the robots battled it out in the ring.
Blake Sweeney, Digital Lighting Lead
The final presentation by the Digital Environments Lead, Justin van der Lek demonstrated how the various elements were brought into Nuke and composited for the final result. He explained how they were able to achieve a sophisticated crowd set up using individual characters captured on green screen that were dynamically placed in their proper locations.
To round out the evening, raffle prizes were awarded by the event sponsors. The first three winners took home Real Steel Crew Packages from Digital Domain, and another lucky winner received a free V-Ray course donated by Escape Studios. The grand prize winner was awarded a free license of V-Ray for Maya, courtesy of the Chaos Group.
It was an exciting and informative event, and hopefully, it’s the first of many more to come.
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