Before we go into details, I am putting a SPOILER WARNING, for those who haven't seen the film yet.
For a film that was so rushed with production and everything else, you would think that it will be a complete fail. But you would be wrong of course, because not only is X-Men: First Class the best reviewed comic book film of this year so far, it is also visually amazing in almost every department thanks to number of VFX companies. We all know that effects have to be great for every big film, and X-Men: First Class no exception. From Magneto lifting the submarine, Banshee flying, that unique transformation of Beast and much more, everything looked great. Below are some unseen photos showing what each company did and some of their thoughts regarding the process of making visual effects for this film.
[Click on the images for high-res version]
Rhythm & Hues:
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Emma Frost VFX
"One of the problems we had was having all the facets on the surface that had a certain thickness and size, so it was hard to read the facial features, even if you added CG eyes. We distilled down what really made up her features – her eyes and lips and eyebrows and hair, and then went about building the model from scratch in 3D. We would find that a certain density of facets would give a nice shape to certain areas but then over-complicate other areas. Matthew would shoot the whole sequence from the beginning all the way to the end, and then get different coverage from different positions. Because Frost was coming in and out of diamond form during the sequences, we didn’t have the luxury of putting her in an mo-cap or tracking suit. So we had to grin and bear it and do the hard core match-moving work. We used witness cameras to help us along, but in the end it took a long time to match-move the performance."
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Azazel
"We went through a lot of development of trying to get a digital fire and smoke sim because he was more closely aligned with the devil. It wasn’t a full-bodied flame but had to be very quick. There was a big fight scene where he appears and disappears. We roto-mated Azazel, so whatever movement he was doing would affect the sim of the smoke. And then we also had to do the tail, which we built and animated in CG and added in some transparency and textures for a real-world feel. The final setup was to use an individual fire fluid simulation for each of the characters that transported and an overall smoke fluid simulation that was emitted from all the characters, all of which was created in Maya 2011. For the fire, we filled the body with particles, which would be used to emit the fire fluid, and then animated their size so that if it was an incoming transport the fire portal would move from the front to the back and linger a little behind Azazel, and the reverse for an outgoing transport. It was rendered with PRman, through Renderman Studio, with three heat ranges being assigned either a red, green or blue colour, which gave us a lot of control in Nuke to quickly adjust its colour and opacity to create realistic looking fire. As Azazel’s transport effect included fire, and a lot of the shots where he came or left he was in a fairly stationary position, we took a different approach from X2′s Nightcrawler, squash and stretch disappearing technique. We used the evolving fire as a mask to hide or reveal the body as it moves through him and applied some subtle heat distortion so that the body would ripple out from the centre of the effect to make it feel like he came through the portal as opposed to a Star Trek style dissolve teleport effect."
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Cerebro
"The thing they most liked was the effect of the first movie which was a cloudy gaseous world where everyone appears and disappears. We had to come up with a slightly simpler version of that. If you’re human, you’re black and white, but if you’re mutant you’re in color. Once we had that 3D camera, we then used a combination of full 3D smoke, with different layers, again using fluid dynamics. Then we took some real practical smoke elements that were wrapped around 3D objects and moved within the Nuke environment. It was a combination of real and fake elements"
Luma Pictures:
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Darwin VFX
"He’s trying to contain this energy from within so he’s reactively swapping between all these different material properties. He goes from human to metal, which starts to heat up. And then he transitions into stone thinking that will contain it. There’s a beat in there when he transforms almost back into human state and you think he’s going to be OK, but not for long. We didn’t want him to feel like it was a surface wipe. As the metal heated up, it had to feel like it was heating up from a central core and then that was the trigger for different portions of him to turn to stone."
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Havok VFX
"The rings were based more on rendering actual geometry and soft bodies and using cloth sims to define the geo. The beam coming out and the rings couldn’t feel too rigid – it had to feel like they were made out of energy and expand and contract and deform slightly."
MPC:
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Beast VFX
"Most of the effects in the shot were controlled by a rig moving the muscles, tendons and all the veins. The veins were actually triggered by the rig creating maps later used in lighting to displace the skin. Actually, by the end we even developed a foot fetish because we had been looking at feet every day for three months trying to understand how they move. We really needed to have a near-perfect human foot to sell the rest of the effect. So that meant 80 per cent of our time was actually spent on the human foot. We also had the challenge of going from a skin foot to a blue foot, which was difficult to make look real. All the work went into the transition – how we get from the skin color to the blue color. We tried to make the color sit out of the veins, so we had to develop a vein network – big veins for the arteries, medium-sized and down to the capillaries. We had them animated to come up to the surface during the transformation, so we could believe the serum was changing the color of the blood inside the vein and the color was seeping out like blotting paper."
Digital Domain:
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Sebastian Shaw VFX
"The character design was a challenge that we brainstormed with John Dykstra. How should it manifest itself say through muscle ripples or his arms getting extended? Eventually, it occurred to us that we were doing a horror effect – a la Frankenstein. When he absorbs nuclear energy from the submarine, you could see his face distorting and meta-morphisizing into this monster. You see him transform up close full screen and then turn back into a human photorealistic Kevin Bacon. It was interesting, even though we had a 3D scan, and we spent a lot of look-dev and matching him photorealistically, what we did notice when they did a re-shoot and we dropped in our rendered Kevin Bacon, we realized our Kevin Bacon didn’t match the new Kevin Bacon because the original scan was months earlier and his body had changed. So we had to re-adjust the model in the look-dev to match the new Kevin Bacon. Going into the show we knew for the mirror room it would be very highly reflective with mirrors and lots of motion blur, so we went with V-Ray. It had also come out with certain skin shaders and hair shaders that we were able to utilize. We were trying to design the character and giving him multiple hands and arms. Is there one arm that fans out? Is it high frequency? In the end, the character was entirely CG – his face, his sunglasses, his hair, his hands. The explosion was tricky because we didn’t have any reference of someone holding a grenade and it exploding – was it slow-motion? No, it was more or less real time how he absorbed this grenade. We went with the thought that the grenade energy was this zero gravity explosion that happened – he’s absorbing it and it’s going into his skin and up his sleeves. The fire and absorption was done in Houdini. We had a lot of rigging techniques for the animation of the multiple arms and multiple heads. There were different models of the heads we used that were introduced into the animation for the horror effect."
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Starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jason Flemyng, Nicholas Hoult, Kevin Bacon, Caleb Landry Jones, Lucas Till, Jennifer Lawrence and January Jones,
X-Men: First Class is in theatres now!